Approaches for the analysis and specification of business vocabularies and rules are very relevant topics in both Business Process Management and Information Systems Development disciplines. However, in common practice of Information Systems Development, the Businessmodeling activities still are of mostly empiric nature. In this paper, basic aspects of the approach for business vocabularies' semi-automated extraction from business process models are presented. The approach is based on novel businessmodeling-level OMG standards "Business Process Model and Notation" (BPMN) and "Semantics for Business Vocabularies and Business Rules" (SBVR), thus contributing to OMG's vision about Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and to model-driven development in general.

The traditional business process design methods, in which the usecase is the most typical, have no useful framework to design the activity sequence with. Therefore, the design efficiency and quality vary widely according to the designer’s experience and skill. In this paper, to solve this problem, we propose the business events and their state transition model (a basic business event model) based on the language/action perspective, which is the result in the cognitive science domain. In the business process design, using this model, we decide event occurrence conditions so that every event synchronizes with each other. We also propose the design pattern to decide the event occurrence condition (a business event improvement strategy). Lastly, we apply the business process design method based on the business event model and the business event improvement strategy to the credit card issue process and estimate its effect.

AAL systems require, in addition to sophisticated and reliable technology, adequate businessmodels for their launch and sustainable establishment. This paper presents the basic features of alternative businessmodels for a sensor-based fall recognition system which was developed within the context of the "Lower Saxony Research Network Design of Environments for Ageing" (GAL). The models were developed parallel to the R&D process with successive adaptation and concretization. An overview of the basic features (i.e. nine partial models) of the businessmodel is given and the mutual exclusive alternatives for each partial model are presented. The partial models are interconnected and the combinations of compatible alternatives lead to consistent alternative businessmodels. However, in the current state, only initial concepts of alternative businessmodels can be deduced. The next step will be to gather additional information to work out more detailed models. PMID:25148563

"Businessmodel" was one of the great buzz-words of the Internet boom. A company didn't need a strategy, a special competence, or even any customers--all it needed was a Web-basedbusinessmodel that promised wild profits in some distant, ill-defined future. Many people--investors, entrepreneurs, and executives alike--fell for the fantasy and got burned. And as the inevitable counterreaction played out, the concept of the businessmodel fell out of fashion nearly as quickly as the .com appendage itself. That's a shame. As Joan Magretta explains, a good businessmodel remains essential to every successful organization, whether it's a new venture or an established player. To help managers apply the concept successfully, she defines what a businessmodel is and how it complements a smart competitive strategy. Businessmodels are, at heart, stories that explain how enterprises work. Like a good story, a robust businessmodel contains precisely delineated characters, plausible motivations, and a plot that turns on an insight about value. It answers certain questions: Who is the customer? How do we make money? What underlying economic logic explains how we can deliver value to customers at an appropriate cost? Every viable organization is built on a sound businessmodel, but a businessmodel isn't a strategy, even though many people use the terms interchangeably. Businessmodels describe, as a system, how the pieces of a business fit together. But they don't factor in one critical dimension of performance: competition. That's the job of strategy. Illustrated with examples from companies like American Express, EuroDisney, WalMart, and Dell Computer, this article clarifies the concepts of businessmodels and strategy, which are fundamental to every company's performance. PMID:12024761

Clinical activities can be seen as results of precise and defined events' succession where every single phase is characterized by a waiting time which includes working duration and possible delay. Technology makes part of this process. For a proper business continuity management, planning the minimum number of devices according to the working load only is not enough. A risk analysis on the whole process should be carried out in order to define which interventions and extra purchase have to be made. Markov models and reliability engineering approaches can be used for evaluating the possible interventions and to protect the whole system from technology failures. The following paper reports a case study on the application of the proposed integrated model, including risk analysis approach and queuing theory model, for defining the proper number of device which are essential to guarantee medical activity and comply the business continuity management requirements in hospitals. PMID:24109839

Nutritional advice has mainly focused on population-level recommendations. Recent developments in nutrition, communication, and marketing sciences have enabled potential deviations from this dominant businessmodel in the direction of personalisation of nutrition advice. Such personalisation efforts can take on many forms, but these have in common that they can only be effective if they are supported by a viable businessmodel. The present paper takes an inventory of approaches to personalised nutrition currently available in the market place as its starting point to arrive at an identification of their underlying businessmodels. This analysis is presented as a unifying framework against which the potential of nutrigenomics-based personalised advice can be assessed. It has uncovered nine archetypical approaches to personalised nutrition advice in terms of their dominant underlying businessmodels. Differentiating features among such businessmodels are the type of information that is used as a basis for personalisation, the definition of the target group, the communication channels that are being adopted, and the partnerships that are built as a part of the businessmodel. Future research should explore the consumer responses to the diversity of "archetypical" businessmodels for personalised nutrition advice as a source of market information on which the delivery of nutrigenomics-based personalised nutrition advice may further build. PMID:22903899

In this paper we discuss the importance of ensuring that business processes are label robust and agile at the same time robust and agile. To this end, we consider reviewing the way business processes are managed. For instance we consider offering a flexible way to model processes so that changes in regulations are handled through some self-healing mechanisms. These changes may raise exceptions at run-time if not properly reflected on these processes. To this end we propose a new rule basedmodel that adopts the ECA rules and is built upon formal tools. The business logic of a process can be summarized with a set of rules that implement an organization’s policies. Each business rule is formalized using our ECAPE formalism (Event-Condition-Action-Post condition- post Event). This formalism allows translating a process into a graph of rules that is analyzed in terms of reliably and flexibility.

Outlines a conceptual framework for using a problem-based learning model for teaching the Instructional Design Business Acquisition Process. Discusses writing a response to a request for proposal, developing a working prototype, orally presenting the solution, and the impact of problem-based learning on students' perception of their confidence in…

The emergence of the Internet has changed the high technology marketing channels thoroughly in the past decade while E-commerce has already become one of the most efficient channels which high technology firms may skip the intermediaries and reach end customers directly. However, defining appropriate e-businessmodels for commercializing new high technology products or services through Internet are not that easy. To overcome the above mentioned problems, a novel analytic framework based on the concept of high technology customers’ competence set expansion by leveraging high technology service firms’ capabilities and resources as well as novel multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, will be proposed in order to define an appropriate e-businessmodel. An empirical example study of a silicon intellectual property (SIP) commercialization e-businessmodelbased on MCDM techniques will be provided for verifying the effectiveness of this novel analytic framework. The analysis successful assisted a Taiwanese IC design service firm to define an e-businessmodel for maximizing its customer’s SIP transactions. In the future, the novel MCDM framework can be applied successful to novel businessmodel definitions in the high technology industry.

This paper addresses the design and engineering problem related to mobile data services. The aim of the research is to inform and advise mobile service design and engineering by looking at this issue from a rigorous and holistic perspective. To this aim, this paper develops an ontology based on businessmodel thinking. The developed ontology identifies four primary dimensions in designing businessmodels of mobile data services: value proposition, value network, value architecture, and value finance. Within these dimensions, 15 key design concepts are identified along with their interrelationships and rules in the telecommunication service businessmodel domain and unambiguous semantics are produced. The developed ontology is of value to academics and practitioners alike, particularly those interested in strategic-oriented IS/IT and business developments in telecommunications. Employing the developed ontology would systemize mobile service engineering functions and make them more manageable, effective, and creative. The research approach to building the mobile service businessmodel ontology essentially follows the design science paradigm. Within this paradigm, we incorporate a number of different research methods, so the employed methodology might be better characterized as a pluralist approach.

An organization’s ability to embrace change, greatly depends on systems that support their operation. Specifically, process engines might facilitate or hinder changes, depending on their flexibility, their extensibility and the changes required: current workflow engine characteristics create difficulties in organizations that need to incorporate some types of modifications. In this paper we present Cumbia, an extensible MDE platform to support the development of flexible and extensible process engines. In a Cumbia process, models represent participating concerns (control, resources, etc.), which are described with concern-specific languages. Cumbia models are executed in a coordinated way, using extensible engines specialized for each concern.

Monarch High School in Boulder, Colorado, is one of 25 schools piloting the High School of Business program, an accelerated business administration program developed by Columbus, Ohio-based MBA"Research" and Curriculum Center. This article describes the program which uses a heavily project-based pedagogy to teach a curriculum modeled after college…

Firms achieve competitive advantage in part through the development of cooperative relations with other firms and organisations. We describe a program of research designed to map and model the development of cooperative inter-firm relations, including the processes and paths by which firms may evolve from adversarial to more cooperative relations. Narrative-event-history methods will be used to develop stylised histories of the emergence of business relations in various contexts and to identify relevant causal mechanisms to be included in the agent-basedmodels of relationship and network evolution. The relationship histories will provide the means of assuring the agent-basedmodels developed.

In this era, there is a lot of business process modeling techniques. This article is the research about differences of business process modeling techniques. For each technique will explain about the definition and the structure. This paper presents a comparative analysis of some popular business process modelling techniques. The comparative framework is based on 2 criteria: notation and how it works when implemented in Somerleyton Animal Park. Each technique will end with the advantages and disadvantages. The final conclusion will give recommend of business process modeling techniques that easy to use and serve the basis for evaluating further modelling techniques.

This article provides new insights into the different strategy paths or businessmodels currently being implemented by Canadian biopharma companies. Through a case-study methodology, seven biopharma companies pertaining to three businessmodels were analyzed, leading to a broad set of results emerging from the following areas: activity, businessmodel and strategy; management and human resources; and R&D, technology and innovation strategy. The three businessmodels represented were: model 1 (conventional biotech oriented to new drug development, radical innovation and search for discoveries); model 2 (development of a technology platform, usually in proteomics and bioinformatics); and model 3 (incremental innovation, with shorter and less risky development timelines). PMID:21708279

Due to advances in technology and the rapid growth of online services, a significant number of new and inventive web-based service models and delivery methods have been introduced. Although online resources and services are having an impact on more traditional service delivery mechanisms, it is not yet clear how these emerging mechanisms for online service delivery will result in profitable businessmodels. In this paper, we consider emerging businessmodels for online services and their implications for how services are delivered, used, and paid for.We demonstrate the changing roles of user / consumer and provider / seller. We also discuss the applicability of different businessmodels for various domains.

Major forces are now reshaping all businesses on a global basis, including the healthcare and clinical laboratory industries. One of the major forces at work is information technology (IT), which now provides the opportunity to create a new economic and businessmodel for the clinical laboratory industry based on the creation of an integrated vertical meta-network, referred to here as the "total laboratory solution" (TLS). Participants at the most basic level of such a network would include a hospital-based laboratory, a reference laboratory, a laboratory information system/application service provider/laboratory portal vendor, an in vitro diagnostic manufacturer, and a pharmaceutical/biotechnology manufacturer. It is suggested that each of these participants would add value to the network primarily in its area of core competency. Subvariants of such a network have evolved over recent years, but a TLS comprising all or most of these participants does not exist at this time. Although the TLS, enabled by IT and closely akin to the various e-businesses that are now taking shape, offers many advantages from a theoretical perspective over the current laboratory businessmodel, its success will depend largely on (a) market forces, (b) how the collaborative networks are organized and managed, and (c) whether the network can offer healthcare organizations higher quality testing services at lower cost. If the concept is successful, new demands will be placed on hospital-based laboratory professionals to shift the range of professional services that they offer toward clinical consulting, integration of laboratory information from multiple sources, and laboratory information management. These information management and integration tasks can only increase in complexity in the future as new genomic and proteomics testing modalities are developed and come on-line in clinical laboratories. PMID:11468263

The importance of the process point of view is not restricted to a specific enterprise sector. In the field of health, as a result of the nature of the service offered, health institutions' processes are also the basis for decision making which is focused on achieving their objective of providing quality medical assistance. In this chapter the application of business process modelling - using the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) standard is described. Main challenges of business process modelling in healthcare are the definition of healthcare processes, the multi-disciplinary nature of healthcare, the flexibility and variability of the activities involved in health care processes, the need of interoperability between multiple information systems, and the continuous updating of scientific knowledge in healthcare. PMID:22925789

Up until now, there has been little research on why people introduce errors in real-world business process models. In a more general context, Simon [404] points to the limitations of cognitive capabilities and concludes that humans act rationally only to a certain extent. Concerning modeling errors, this argument would imply that human modelers lose track of the interrelations of large and complex models due to their limited cognitive capabilities and introduce errors that they would not insert in a small model. A recent study by Mendling et al. [275] explores in how far certain complexity metrics of business process models have the potential to serve as error determinants. The authors conclude that complexity indeed appears to have an impact on error probability. Before we can test such a hypothesis in a more general setting, we have to establish an understanding of how we can define determinants that drive error probability and how we can measure them.

Intelligent information systems are acting by structured rules and do not deal with possible impact on the business environment or future consequences. That is the main reason why automated decisions based on such rules cannot take responsibility and requires involvement or approval of dedicated business people. This limits decision automation possibilities in information systems. However, business rules describe business policy and represent business logics. This can be used in intelligent information systems, together with risk assessment model to simulate real business environment and evaluate possible impact of automated decisions, to support intelligent decision automation. The chapter proposes risk and business rule model integration to provide full intelligent decision automation model used for business rule enforcement and implementation into intelligent software systems of information systems.

The increasing focus on the costs of care is forcing health care organizations to critically look at their basic set of processes and activities, to determine what type of value they can deliver. A businessmodel describes the resources, processes, and cost assumptions that an organization makes that will lead to the delivery of a unique value proposition to a customer. As health care organizations are beginning to transform their structure in preparation for a value-based delivery system, understanding businessmodel theory can help in the redesign process. PMID:27018909

Creating long-duration, high-powered lasers, for satellites, that can withstand the type of optical misalignment and damage dished out by the unforgiving environment of space, is work that is unique to NASA. It is complicated, specific work, where each step forward is into uncharted territory. In the 1990s, as this technology was first being created, NASA gave free reign to a group of "laser jocks" to develop their own businessmodel and supply the Space Agency with the technology it needed. It was still to be a part of NASA as a division of Goddard Space Flight Center, but would operate independently out of a remote office. The idea for this satellite laboratory was based on the Skunk Works concept at Lockheed Martin Corporation. Formerly known as the Lockheed Corporation, in 1943, the aerospace firm, realizing that the type of advanced research it needed done could not be performed within the confines of a larger company, allowed a group of researchers and engineers to essentially run their own microbusiness without the corporate oversight. The Skunk Works project, in Burbank, California, produced America s first jet fighter, the world s most successful spy plane (U-2), the first 3-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance aircraft, and the F-117A Nighthawk Stealth Fighter. Boeing followed suit with its Phantom Works, an advanced research and development branch of the company that operates independent of the larger unit and is responsible for a great deal of its most cutting-edge research. NASA s version of this advanced businessmodel was the Space Lidar Technology Center (SLTC), just south of Goddard, in College Park, Maryland. Established in 1998 under a Cooperative Agreement between Goddard and the University of Maryland s A. James Clark School of Engineering, it was a high-tech laser shop where a small group of specialists, never more than 20 employees, worked all hours of the day and night to create the cutting- edge technology the Agency required of them. Drs

This report describes the context and goals of the Higher Education Funding Council for England's e-University project to develop Internet-based higher education. It summarizes the proposed businessmodel and outlines next steps in implementing the project. A February 2000 letter announced the project and invited higher education institutions…

The development of formal models related to the organizational aspects of an enterprise is fundamental when these aspects must be re-engineered and digitalized, especially when the enterprise is involved in the dynamics and value flows of a business network. Businessmodeling provides an opportunity to synthesize and make business processes, business rules and the structural aspects of an organization explicit, allowing business managers to control their complexity and guide an enterprise through effective decisional and strategic activities. This chapter discusses the main results of the TEKNE project in terms of software components that enable enterprises to configure, store, search and share models of any aspects of their business while leveraging standard and business-oriented technologies and languages to bridge the gap between the world of business people and IT experts and to foster effective business-to-business collaborations.

The emerging area of business process intelligence attempts to enhance the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by employing data warehousing and mining technologies. This paper presents an approach to re-engineering the business process modeling in conformity with the multidimensional data model. Since the business process and the multidimensional model are driven by rather different objectives and assumptions, there is no straightforward solution to converging these models.

A school-basedbusiness program in Georgia is attempting to broaden the education of high school students by making them more aware of the role of small business in the United States economy and the economic possibilities offered by entrepreneurship. Goals of school-basedbusinesses are to create profit-making enterprises that meet unfilled needs…

Economic growth will come from knowledge-basedbusinesses whose "smart" products filter and interpret information. Businesses will come to think of themselves as educators and their customers as learners. (SK)

As health care moves to value orientation, radiology's traditional businessmodel faces challenges to adapt. The authors describe a strategic value framework that radiology practices can use to best position themselves in their environments. This simplified construct encourages practices to define their dominant value propositions. There are 3 main value propositions that form a conceptual triangle, whose vertices represent the low-cost provider, the product leader, and the customer intimacy models. Each vertex has been a valid market position, but each demands specific capabilities and trade-offs. The underlying concepts help practices select value propositions they can successfully deliver in their competitive environments. PMID:23245438

The discussion on economically sustainable businessmodels with respect to information technology is lacking in many aspects of proven approaches. In the following contribution the economic viability is valued based on a procedural model for design and evaluation of e-learning businessmodels in the form of a case study. As a case study object a…

Telemedicine has become an increasingly popular option for long-distance/virtual medical care and education, but many telemedicine ventures fail to grow beyond the initial pilot stage. Studying the businessmodels of successful telemedicine ventures can help develop business strategies for upcoming ventures. This article describes businessmodels of eight telemedicine ventures from different regions of the world using Osterwalder's "BusinessModel Canvas." The ventures are chosen on the basis of their apparent success and their diverse value chains. The businessmodels are compared to draw inferences and lessons regarding their business strategy and contextual factors that influenced it. Key differences between telemedicine business practices in developing and developed countries are also discussed. The purpose of this article is to inform and inspire the business strategy of the next generation of telemedicine ventures to be economically sustainable and to successfully address local healthcare challenges. PMID:23540278

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) holds promise for business agility since it allows business process to change to meet new customer demands or market needs without causing a cascade effect of changes in the underlying IT systems. Business rules are the instrument chosen to help business and IT to collaborate. In this paper, we propose the utilization of simulation models to model and simulate strategic business rules that are then disaggregated at different levels of an SOA architecture. Our proposal is aimed to help find a good configuration for strategic business objectives and IT parameters. The paper includes a case study where a simulation model is built to help business decision-making in a context where finding a good configuration for different business parameters and performance is too complex to analyze by trial and error.

In this study, the authors developed a structural equation model that accounted for 79% of the variability of a student's final grade point average by using a sample size of 147 students. The model is based on student grades in 4 foundational business courses: introduction to business, macroeconomics, statistics, and using databases. Educators and…

The development of IT will lead to the integration of computers and networks, and IT will become more function oriented service and result in an indispensable part of the social infrastructure. This means that the critical point will shift from prioritizing “ownership of IS (Information Systems) before anything else” to “how IT will be utilized.” By reaching this technology level, Western origin non-discretion oriented management concept where IT is used as an enabler and IT-basedbusiness tools can be flexible enough to accommodate highly discretion oriented practices in Japanese organizations. In other words, IT can finally be utilized in a Japanese way. Taking account of the technological development trend, there is a need to take a macro look at the meaning of the concept of businessmodels, something that has become viewed in the “micro” as patent-related issues. Under such trends, the greater freedom in business design the multipurpose use of IT functions is providing, the more critical a capability in the design of an elaborate businessmodel is becoming.

The process-centered design of organizations and information systems is globally seen as an appropriate response to the increased economic pressure on organizations. At the methodological core of process-centered management is process modeling. However, business process modeling in large initiatives can be a time-consuming and costly exercise, making it potentially difficult to convince executive management of its benefits. To date, and despite substantial interest and research in the area of process modeling, the understanding of the actual benefits of process modeling in academia and practice is limited. To address this gap, this paper explores the perception of benefits derived from process modeling initiatives, as reported through a global Delphi study. The study incorporates the views of three groups of stakeholders - academics, practitioners and vendors. Our findings lead to the first identification and ranking of 19 unique benefits associated with process modeling. The study in particular found that process modeling benefits vary significantly between practitioners and academics. We argue that the variations may point to a disconnect between research projects and practical demands.

Effective businessmodels for teledermatology must be implemented to make the practice a feasible option for dermatologists to deliver care. This study sought to detect and report types of teledermatology businessmodels in practice. We interviewed 19 private and academic dermatologists who have been reimbursed for teledermatology services. Most respondents described teledermatology businessmodels fitting 4 categories-standard fee-for-service reimbursement from insurance, capitated service contracts, per-case service contracts, and direct to consumer-which are described in this article. We also anticipate new teledermatology businessmodels will be needed as technology and insurance reimbursements evolve. PMID:27163914

Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software. Commercial open source at first glance represents an economic paradox: How can a firm earn money if it is making its product available for free as open source? This paper presents the core properties of com mercial open source businessmodels and discusses how they work. Using a commercial open source approach, firms can get to market faster with a superior product at lower cost than possible for traditional competitors. The paper shows how these benefits accrue from an engaged and self-supporting user community. Lacking any prior comprehensive reference, this paper is based on an analysis of public statements by practitioners of commercial open source. It forges the various anecdotes into a coherent description of revenue generation strategies and relevant business functions.

The paper deals with the applications of modeling and simulation tools in the optimization of business processes, especially in solving an optimization of signal flow in security company. As a modeling tool was selected Simul8 software that is used to process modelingbased on discrete event simulation and which enables the creation of a visual model of production and distribution processes.

The economic proverb "There is no such thing such as a free lunch" applies also to open educational resources (OER). In recent years, several authors have used revenue models and businessmodels to analyse the different sources of possible funding for OER. In this article the businessmodels of Osterwalder and Chesbrough are combined with research…

The future of business intelligence in space exploration will focus on the intelligent system-of-systems real-time enterprise. In present business intelligence, a number of technologies that are most relevant to space exploration are experiencing the greatest change. Emerging patterns of set of processes rather than organizational units leading to end-to-end automation is becoming a major objective of enterprise information technology. The cost element is a leading factor of future exploration systems. This technology project is to advance an integrated Planning and Management Simulation Model for evaluation of risks, costs, and reliability of launch systems from Earth to Orbit for Space Exploration. The approach builds on research done in the NASA ARC/KSC developed Virtual Test Bed (VTB) to integrate architectural, operations process, and mission simulations for the purpose of evaluating enterprise level strategies to reduce cost, improve systems operability, and reduce mission risks. The objectives are to understand the interdependency of architecture and process on recurring launch cost of operations, provide management a tool for assessing systems safety and dependability versus cost, and leverage lessons learned and empirical models from Shuttle and International Space Station to validate models applied to Exploration. The systems-of-systems concept is built to balance the conflicting objectives of safety, reliability, and process strategy in order to achieve long term sustainability. A planning and analysis test bed is needed for evaluation of enterprise level options and strategies for transit and launch systems as well as surface and orbital systems. This environment can also support agency simulation based acquisition process objectives. The technology development approach is based on the collaborative effort set forth in the VTB's integrating operations, process models, systems and environment models, and cost models as a comprehensive disciplined

This technology project is to advance an integrated Planning and Management Simulation Model for evaluation of risks, costs, and reliability of launch systems from Earth to Orbit for Space Exploration. The approach builds on research done in the NASA ARC/KSC developed Virtual Test Bed (VTB) to integrate architectural, operations process, and mission simulations for the purpose of evaluating enterprise level strategies to reduce cost, improve systems operability, and reduce mission risks. The objectives are to understand the interdependency of architecture and process on recurring launch cost of operations, provide management a tool for assessing systems safety and dependability versus cost, and leverage lessons learned and empirical models from Shuttle and International Space Station to validate models applied to Exploration. The systems-of-systems concept is built to balance the conflicting objectives of safety, reliability, and process strategy in order to achieve long term sustainability. A planning and analysis test bed is needed for evaluation of enterprise level options and strategies for transit and launch systems as well as surface and orbital systems. This environment can also support agency simulation .based acquisition process objectives. The technology development approach is based on the collaborative effort set forth in the VTB's integrating operations. process models, systems and environment models, and cost models as a comprehensive disciplined enterprise analysis environment. Significant emphasis is being placed on adapting root cause from existing Shuttle operations to exploration. Technical challenges include cost model validation, integration of parametric models with discrete event process and systems simulations. and large-scale simulation integration. The enterprise architecture is required for coherent integration of systems models. It will also require a plan for evolution over the life of the program. The proposed technology will produce

In January 2015, thirteen Washington community colleges launched an online, competency-basedbusiness transfer degree--the first in the state's community and technical college system. This issue brief provides answers to commonly asked questions about the new competency-based degree.

This paper describes the design, implementation, and application of interactive World Wide Web-based learning, based on several business courses taught at Bronx Community College/The City University of New York. The first section summarizes ways the Web was used, including managing the dissemination of course materials, instructor/student…

The global economy is a complex dynamical system, whose cyclical fluctuations can mainly be characterized by simultaneous recessions or expansions of major economies. Thus, the researches on the synchronization phenomenon are key to understanding and controlling the dynamics of the global economy. Based on a pairwise maximum entropy model, we analyze the business cycle synchronization of the G7 economic system. We obtain a pairwise-interaction network, which exhibits certain clustering structure and accounts for 45% of the entire structure of the interactions within the G7 system. We also find that the pairwise interactions become increasingly inadequate in capturing the synchronization as the size of economic system grows. Thus, higher-order interactions must be taken into account when investigating behaviors of large economic systems.

We formalise and present a new generic multifaceted complex system approach for modelling complex business enterprises. Our method has a strong focus on integrating the various data types available in an enterprise which represent the diverse perspectives of various stakeholders. We explain the challenges faced and define a novel approach to converting diverse data types into usable Bayesian probability forms. The data types that can be integrated include historic data, survey data, and management planning data, expert knowledge and incomplete data. The structural complexities of the complex system modelling process, based on various decision contexts, are also explained along with a solution. This new application of complex system models as a management tool for decision making is demonstrated using a railway transport case study. The case study demonstrates how the new approach can be utilised to develop a customised decision support model for a specific enterprise. Various decision scenarios are also provided to illustrate the versatility of the decision model at different phases of enterprise operations such as planning and control. PMID:26247591

We formalise and present a new generic multifaceted complex system approach for modelling complex business enterprises. Our method has a strong focus on integrating the various data types available in an enterprise which represent the diverse perspectives of various stakeholders. We explain the challenges faced and define a novel approach to converting diverse data types into usable Bayesian probability forms. The data types that can be integrated include historic data, survey data, and management planning data, expert knowledge and incomplete data. The structural complexities of the complex system modelling process, based on various decision contexts, are also explained along with a solution. This new application of complex system models as a management tool for decision making is demonstrated using a railway transport case study. The case study demonstrates how the new approach can be utilised to develop a customised decision support model for a specific enterprise. Various decision scenarios are also provided to illustrate the versatility of the decision model at different phases of enterprise operations such as planning and control. PMID:26247591

Although typically applied to entire enterprises, the concept of businessmodels applies to training and performance improvement groups. Businessmodels are "the method by which firm[s] build and use [their] resources to offer.. value." Businessmodels affect the types of projects, services offered, skills required, business processes, and type of…

New developments in the area of computer-aided system engineering (CASE) greatly improve processes of the information systems development life cycle (ISDLC). Much effort is put into the quality improvement issues, but IS development projects still suffer from the poor quality of models during the system analysis and design cycles. At some degree, quality of models that are developed using CASE tools can be assured using various. automated. model comparison, syntax. checking procedures. It. is also reasonable to check these models against the business domain knowledge, but the domain knowledge stored in the repository of CASE tool (enterprise model) is insufficient (Gudas et al. 2004). Involvement of business domain experts into these processes is complicated because non- IT people often find it difficult to understand models that were developed by IT professionals using some specific modeling language.

This chapter discusses the successful implementation of the Arizona Comprehensive Competency-Based Guidance program model, and how lessons learned from this project can be applied to business and industry settings. Also discussed is the Career Decidedness Study, developed to improve counseling skills and the services offered to employees seeking…

The huge demand for situational and ad-hoc applications desired by the mass of business end users led to a new kind of Web applications, well-known as Enterprise Mashups. Users with no or limited programming skills are empowered to leverage in a collaborative manner existing Mashup components by combining and reusing company internal and external resources within minutes to new value added applications. Thereby, Enterprise Mashup environments interact as intermediaries to match the supply of providers and demand of consumers. By following the design science approach, we propose an interaction phase model artefact based on market transaction phases to structure required intermediary features. By means of five case studies, we demonstrate the application of the designed model and identify three generic businessmodel types for Enterprise Mashups intermediaries (directory, broker, and marketplace). So far, intermediaries following a real marketplace businessmodel don’t exist in context of Enterprise Mashups and require further research for this emerging paradigm.

Nine successful community college programs for small business management training are described in this report in terms of their college and economic context, purpose, offerings, delivery modes, operating and marketing strategies, community outreach, support services, faculty and staff, evaluation, and future directions. The model programs are…

Fending off new competitors is a perennial struggle for established companies. Govindarajan and Trimble, of Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, explain why: Many corporations become too comfortable with their existing businessmodels and neglect the necessary work of radically reinventing them. The authors map out an alternative in their "three boxes" framework. They argue that while a CEO manages the present (box 1), he or she must also selectively forget the past (box 2) in order to create the future (box 3). Infosys chairman N.R. Narayana Murthy mastered the three boxes to reinvigorate his company and greatly increased its changes of enduring for generations. PMID:21370808

The reforms in the field of medical specialist care have important implications for the professional practice of medical specialists and their working relationship with the hospital. This leads to a considerable amount of pressure placed upon the way physicians have traditionally practiced their liberal professions, which is by forming partnerships and practicing from within the hospitals based on an admission agreement. As of 2015, the tax benefits for entrepreneurs will be abolished and the formation of regional partnerships will be discouraged. These developments not only pose threats but also offer opportunities for both the entrepreneurial medical specialist and the innovative hospital. In this article, the prospect of a future businessmodel for specialist medical care will be outlined and explored by proposing three new organizational forms. The central vision of this model is that physicians who wish to retain their status of liberal professional practitioners in the twenty-first century should be more involved in the ownership structure of hospitals. The social importance of responsible patient care remains paramount. PMID:23985238

Marine reserves are an effective tool for protecting biodiversity locally, with potential economic benefits including enhancement of local fisheries, increased tourism, and maintenance of ecosystem services. However, fishing communities often fear short-term income losses associated with closures, and thus may oppose marine reserves. Here we review empirical data and develop bioeconomic models to show that the value of marine reserves (enhanced adjacent fishing + tourism) may often exceed the pre-reserve value, and that economic benefits can offset the costs in as little as five years. These results suggest the need for a new businessmodel for creating and managing reserves, which could pay for themselves and turn a profit for stakeholder groups. Our model could be expanded to include ecosystem services and other benefits, and it provides a general framework to estimate costs and benefits of reserves and to develop such businessmodels. PMID:23573192

Marine reserves are an effective tool for protecting biodiversity locally, with potential economic benefits including enhancement of local fisheries, increased tourism, and maintenance of ecosystem services. However, fishing communities often fear short-term income losses associated with closures, and thus may oppose marine reserves. Here we review empirical data and develop bioeconomic models to show that the value of marine reserves (enhanced adjacent fishing + tourism) may often exceed the pre-reserve value, and that economic benefits can offset the costs in as little as five years. These results suggest the need for a new businessmodel for creating and managing reserves, which could pay for themselves and turn a profit for stakeholder groups. Our model could be expanded to include ecosystem services and other benefits, and it provides a general framework to estimate costs and benefits of reserves and to develop such businessmodels. PMID:23573192

Reality-Based Learning, RBL, is a teacher-driven initiative introducing the core business administration subjects to first-year business students by means of making business plans. This paper empirically accounts for the development of RBL over three years. RBL is scrutinized for pros and cons by a proposed education development framework. When…

This model combines in a team-taught course the study of business and a foreign language. The objective is to give business students a foreign language experience in a relatively brief time and also to offer them a business-oriented introduction to a culture other than their own. Students in business courses are preparing for a career in…

This paper proposes a new framework for B to B collaboration process based on a concept of service. Service value, which gives users satisfaction for provided services, depends on the situation, user characteristics, and user objectives in seeking the service. Vargo proposed Service Dominant Logic (SDL), which determines service value according to “value in use”. This concept illustrates the importance of the relationship between the service itself and its situation. This relationship is analogous to electro-magnetic field theory in physics. We developed the concept of service fields to create service value based on an analogy of the electro-magnetic field. By applying this concept to B to B collaboration, a model of service value co-creation in the collaboration can be formulated. Then, the collaboration can be described by 4 steps of KIKI model (Knowledge sharing related to service system, Identification of service field, Knowledge creation for new service idea, Implementation of service idea). As its application to B to B collaboration, the energy saving service business is reported to demonstrate the validity of the proposed collaboration model. This concept can be applied to make a collaboration process effective.

This paper proposes a cooperation system for the XMDR-basedbusiness process. The proposed system solves the problem of heterogeneousness that may take place regarding interoperability of queries in a XMDR-basedbusiness process. Heterogeneousness in an operation of a business process may involve metadata collision, schema collision, or data collision. This can be handled by operating a business process by making use of XMDR-based Global Query and Local Query.

Most health care management training programmes and textbooks focus on only one or two models or conceptual frameworks, but the increasing complexity of health care organizations and their environments worldwide means that a broader perspective is needed. This paper reviews five management models developed for business organizations and analyses issues related to their application in health care. Three older, more 'traditional' models are first presented. These include the functional areas model, the tasks model and the roles model. Each is shown to provide a valuable perspective, but to have limitations if used in isolation. Two newer, more 'innovative' models are next discussed. These include total quality management (TQM) and reengineering. They have shown potential for enabling dramatic improvements in quality and cost, but have also been found to be more difficult to implement. A series of 'lessons learned' are presented to illustrate key success factors for applying them in health care organizations. In sum, each of the five models is shown to provide a useful perspective for health care management. Health care managers should gain experience and training with a broader set of business management models. PMID:12476639

Businessmodel innovation is one of the most challenging components of 21st-century leadership. Making incremental improvements to a businessmodel--creating new efficiencies, expanding into adjacent markets--is hard enough. Developing and experimenting with new businessmodels that truly transform how an institution delivers value (while…

Tools that support business process modeling are designed for experienced users to draw a process with precision and professional appearance. These tools are not conducive to sketching quick business design ideas.This demo proposal presents Inkus, a non-intrusive business process sketching tool which allows freehand sketches of process ideas and slowly brings the users to the required common business vocabulary. Our goal is to help unleash creativity in business designers and enrich the design process with values beyond drawing.

Nowadays, a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) seems to be one of the most promising paradigms for leveraging enterprise information systems. SOA creates opportunities for enterprises to provide value added service tailored for on demand enterprise collaboration. With the emergence and rapid development of Web services technologies, SOA is being paid increasing attention and has become widespread. In spite of the popularity of SOA, a standardized framework for modeling and implementing business services are still in progress. For the purpose of supporting these service-oriented solutions, we adopt a model driven development approach. This paper outlines the Contextual Service Oriented Modeling and Analysis (CSOMA) methodology and presents UML profiles for the PIM level service-oriented architectural modeling, as well as its corresponding meta-models. The proposed PIM (Platform Independent Model) describes the business SOA at a high level of abstraction regardless of techniques involved in the application employment. In addition, all essential service-specific concerns required for delivering quality and context-aware service are covered. Some of the advantages of this approach are that it is generic and thus not closely allied with Web service technology as well as specifically treating the service adaptability during the design stage.

Many universities look to start-up companies as a way to attract faculty, supporting research and students as traditional federal sources become harder to come by. University affiliated start-up companies can apply for a broader suite of grants, as well as market their services to a broad customer base. Often university administrators see this as a potential panacea, but national statistics show this is not the case. Rarely do universities profit significantly from their start-ups. With a success rates of around 20%, most start-ups end up costing the university money as well as faculty-time. For the faculty, assuming they want to continue in academia, a start-up is often unattractive because it commonly leads out of academia. Running a successful business as well as maintaining a strong teaching and research load is almost impossible to do at the same time. Most businessmodels and business professionals work outside of academia, and the models taught in business schools do not merge well in a university environment. To mitigate this a new businessmodel is proposed where university start-ups are aligned with the academic and research missions of the university. A university start-up must work within the university, directly support research and students, and the work done maintaining the business be recognized as part of the faculty member's university obligations. This requires a complex conflict of interest management plan and for the companies to be non-profit in order to not jeopardize the university's status. This approach may not work well for all universities, but would be ideal for many to conserve resources and ensure a harmonious relationship with their start-ups and faculty.

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... 14 Aeronautics and Space 3 2014-01-01 2014-01-01 false Business office and operations base. 141.25... (CONTINUED) SCHOOLS AND OTHER CERTIFICATED AGENCIES PILOT SCHOOLS General § 141.25 Business office and... principal business office with a mailing address in the name shown on its certificate. (b) The...

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 3 2010-01-01 2010-01-01 false Business office and operations base. 141.25... (CONTINUED) SCHOOLS AND OTHER CERTIFICATED AGENCIES PILOT SCHOOLS General § 141.25 Business office and... principal business office with a mailing address in the name shown on its certificate. (b) The...

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 3 2011-01-01 2011-01-01 false Business office and operations base. 141.25... (CONTINUED) SCHOOLS AND OTHER CERTIFICATED AGENCIES PILOT SCHOOLS General § 141.25 Business office and... principal business office with a mailing address in the name shown on its certificate. (b) The...

... 14 Aeronautics and Space 3 2013-01-01 2013-01-01 false Business office and operations base. 141.25... (CONTINUED) SCHOOLS AND OTHER CERTIFICATED AGENCIES PILOT SCHOOLS General § 141.25 Business office and... principal business office with a mailing address in the name shown on its certificate. (b) The...

This competency-based curriculum guide to business occupations was designed to improve the articulation in business education programs among high schools, between high schools and postsecondary institutions, and between schools and the business community in Arizona. The teaching units are to be used to develop skills in areas identified by…

Undergraduate business law courses typically utilize traditional textbooks organized by topic. Individual chapters, address the usual topics including contracts, torts, the court system and ethics. An innovative approach to facilitating a business law course involves segregating sections of the course into common business disciplines. Rather than…

The increase in antibiotic resistance and the dearth of novel antibiotics have become a growing concern among policy-makers. A combination of financial, scientific, and regulatory challenges poses barriers to antibiotic innovation. However, each of these three challenges provides an opportunity to develop pathways for new businessmodels to bring novel antibiotics to market. Pull-incentives that pay for the outputs of research and development (R&D) and push-incentives that pay for the inputs of R&D can be used to increase innovation for antibiotics. Financial incentives might be structured to promote delinkage of a company's return on investment from revenues of antibiotics. This delinkage strategy might not only increase innovation, but also reinforce rational use of antibiotics. Regulatory approval, however, should not and need not compromise safety and efficacy standards to bring antibiotics with novel mechanisms of action to market. Instead regulatory agencies could encourage development of companion diagnostics, test antibiotic combinations in parallel, and pool and make transparent clinical trial data to lower R&D costs. A tax on non-human use of antibiotics might also create a disincentive for non-therapeutic use of these drugs. Finally, the new businessmodel for antibiotic innovation should apply the 3Rs strategy for encouraging collaborative approaches to R&D in innovating novel antibiotics: sharing resources, risks, and rewards. PMID:24646116

Today's public health programs are complex business systems with multiple levels of collaborating federal, state, and local entities. The use of proven systems engineering modeling techniques to analyze, align, and streamline public health operations is in the beginning stages. The authors review the initial businessmodeling efforts in immunization and cancer registries and present a case to broadly apply businessmodeling approaches to analyze and improve public health processes. PMID:16224291

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Radiation/Nuclear Medical Countermeasures Development Program has developed an integrated approach to providing the resources and expertise required for the research, discovery, and development of radiation/nuclear medical countermeasures (MCMs). These resources and services lower the opportunity costs and reduce the barriers to entry for companies interested in working in this area and accelerate translational progress by providing goal-oriented stewardship of promising projects. In many ways, the radiation countermeasures program functions as a "virtual pharmaceutical firm," coordinating the early and mid-stage development of a wide array of radiation/nuclear MCMs. This commentary describes the radiation countermeasures program and discusses a novel businessmodel that has facilitated product development partnerships between the federal government and academic investigators and biopharmaceutical companies. PMID:21142762

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Radiation/Nuclear Medical Countermeasures Development Program has developed an integrated approach to providing the resources and expertise required for the research, discovery, and development of radiation/nuclear medical countermeasures (MCMs). These resources and services lower the opportunity costs and reduce the barriers to entry for companies interested in working in this area and accelerate translational progress by providing goal-oriented stewardship of promising projects. In many ways, the radiation countermeasures program functions as a “virtual pharmaceutical firm,” coordinating the early and mid-stage development of a wide array of radiation/nuclear MCMs. This commentary describes the radiation countermeasures program and discusses a novel businessmodel that has facilitated product development partnerships between the federal government and academic investigators and biopharmaceutical companies. PMID:21142762

Higher Education is in a state of change, and the existing businessmodels do not meet the needs of stakeholders. This article contrasts the current dominant businessmodels of universities, comparing the traditional non-profit against the for-profit online model, examining the structural features and online teaching practices that underlie each.…

Discusses the design and use of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS) for computerized business simulations. Reviews the use of ITS as an instructional technology; presents a model for ITS-basedbusiness simulations; examines the user interface and link between the ITS and simulation; and recommends expert-consultant diagnostic testing, and…

The current shortfall in effectiveness within conservation biology is illustrated by increasing interest in "evidence-based conservation," whose proponents have identified the need to benchmark conservation initiatives against actions that lead to proven positive effects. The effectiveness of conservation policies, approaches, and evaluation is under increasing scrutiny, and in these areas models of excellence used in business could prove valuable. Typically, conservation programs require years of effort and involve rigorous long-term implementation processes. Successful balance of long-term efforts alongside the achievement of short-term goals is often compromised by management or budgetary constraints, a situation also common in commercial businesses. "Business excellence" is an approach many companies have used over the past 20 years to ensure continued success. Various business excellence evaluations have been promoted that include concepts that could be adapted and applied in conservation programs. We describe a conservation excellence model that shows how scientific processes and results can be aligned with financial and organizational measures of success. We applied the model to two well-documented species conservation programs. In the first, the Po'ouli program, several aspects of improvement were identified, such as more authority for decision making in the field and better integration of habitat management and population recovery processes. The second example, the black-footed ferret program, could have benefited from leadership effort to reduce bureaucracy and to encourage use of best-practice species recovery approaches. The conservation excellence model enables greater clarity in goal setting, more-effective identification of job roles within programs, better links between technical approaches and measures of biological success, and more-effective use of resources. The model could improve evaluation of a conservation program's effectiveness and may be

In order to build the Web-based application as a shopping site on the Web, various ideas from the different viewpoints are required, such as enterprise modeling, workflow modeling, software development, and so on. From the above standpoint, this paper proposes an integrated environment to support the whole development process of analysis, design and implementation of business application. In order to reuse know-hows of various ideas in the business application development, we device a multi-grain-size repository, which consists of coarse-, middle-, and fine-grain-size repositories that correspond to the enterprise models, workflow models, and software models, respectively. We also provide a methodology that rebuilds heterogeneous information resources required for the business applications development into a multi-grain-size repository based on ontologies. The contents of the repositories are modeled by the is-a, has-a, and E-R relations, and described by the XML language. We have implemented Java-based prototype environment with the tools dealing with the multi-layered repository and confirmed that it supports us in various phases of business application development including businessmodel manifestation, detailed businessmodel definition and an implementation of business software applications.

Modern software practices call for the active involvement of business people in the software process. Therefore, programming has become an indispensable part of the information systems component of the core curriculum at business schools. In this paper, we present a model-based approach to teaching introduction to programming to general business…

In this paper, we propose a new solution to Reactive Web Service Composition, via molding with Reinforcement Learning, and introducing modified (alterable) QoS variables into the model as elements in the Markov Decision Process tuple. Moreover, we give an example of Reactive-WSC-based mobile banking, to demonstrate the intrinsic capability of the solution in question of obtaining the optimized service composition, characterized by (alterable) target QoS variable sets with optimized values. Consequently, we come to the conclusion that the solution has decent potentials in boosting customer experiences and qualities of services in Web Services, and those in applications in the whole electronic commerce and business sector.

This report describes a British study designed to produce a businessmodel for an e-university, a concept that did not previously exist. Part 1, "Aims and Objectives," describes the background of the effort, the challenge to the United Kingdom, goals, and objectives. Part 2, "The BusinessModel," describes: the basic concept; markets, courses, and…

Various technologies have been deployed in household devices or micro-water treatment plants for mitigating fluoride and arsenic, and thereby provide safe and affordable drinking water in low-income countries. While the technologies have improved considerably, organizations still face challenges in making them financially sustainable. Financial sustainability questions the businessmodels behind these water technologies. This article makes three contributions to businessmodels in the context of fluoride and arsenic mitigation. Firstly, we describe four businessmodels: A) low-value devices given away to people living in extreme poverty, B) high-value devices sold to low-income customers, C) communities as beneficiaries of micro-water treatment plants and D) entrepreneurs as franchisees for selling water services and highlight the emergence of hybrid businessmodels. Secondly, we show current businessmodel innovations such as cost transparency & cost reductions, secured & extended water payments, business diversification and distribution channels. Thirdly, we describe skills and competencies as part of capacity building for creating even more businessmodel innovations. Together, these three contributions will create more awareness of the role of businessmodels in scaling-up water treatment technologies. PMID:24612490

Project-based Learning (PbL) mirrors that of real-world business situations. PbL engages students in real projects for real corporations. Furthermore, this is an effective learning methodology which can be easily incorporated into a dynamic and challenging learning context such as international business education. Engaging in student-corporate…

The Center for Home-Based Entrepreneurship at Oklahoma State University developed from collaborative efforts of extension, government agencies, business associations, and the vo-tech system. It provides education, directories, information services, and other assistance to people interested in establishing businesses in their homes. (SK)

Accountability is becoming a central theme in business today in the midst of global financial crisis as the corporate scandals and fallouts dominate the front pages of the press. Businesses are demanding more accountability measures built-in at the business process modeling level. Currently the business process modeling standards and methods mainly focus on the sequential flow aspect of business process and leave the business aspect of accountability largely untouched. In this paper, we extend the OMG’s businessmodeling specifications to define a business accountability meta-model. The meta-model is complementary to the OMG’s Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) vision, laying out the foundation for future model generation and transformation for creating accountable business process solutions.

The transition from working in a traditional setting to working at home alone can be challenging for new nurse consultants. Home-based consultants can use a variety of strategies to stay focused and connected, such as having a designated work area, limiting distractions, and networking. Nurse consultants can obtain information about business management from community resources, and computer on-line services offer a means of contacting other small-business owners. Ongoing business evaluations, which include professional accomplishments as well as an examination of income and expenses, help in planning. Home-based nurse consultants can increase the likelihood of business success by setting objectives, working diligently, and networking with others in the business community. PMID:10382409

The term "community college business and finance model" is unlikely to evoke a positive response from educators who resist labeling students as "customers," do not want to call the college's offerings "products," and don't like to hear the college referred to as a "business." Faculty and staff tend…

The 1998 Ministerial Review of General Practice Training identified several areas for improvement that led to major changes in the provision of general practice training, including the establishment of General Practice Education and Training (GPET) and the regionalisation of training. The regionalised training businessmodel has been in place for nearly 10 years, and several key organisations have been involved in its evolution, including the Australian Government, speciality colleges, GPET and regionalised training providers. Both the college-focused and regionalised-focused models have had some successes. These include recognition and support of general practice as a vocational specialty, increased numbers of junior doctors undertaking placements in general practice, and increased numbers of registrars training in rural areas. This period has also seen changes in the governance and decision-making processes with creation of a new framework that is inclusive of all the key players in the new regionalised training system. The future holds challenges for the regionalised training businessmodel as the general practice education and training landscape becomes more complex. The framework in the current model will provide a base to help meet these challenges and allow for further sustainable expansion. PMID:21644862

Chemical Leasing is a service-oriented businessmodel that shifts the focus from increasing sales volume of chemicals towards a value-added approach. Recent pilot projects have shown the economic benefits of introducing Chemical Leasing businessmodels in a broad range of sectors. A decade after its introduction, the promotion of Chemical Leasing is still predominantly done by the public sector and international organizations. We show in this paper that awareness-raising activities to disseminate information on this innovative businessmodel mainly focus on the economic benefits. We argue that selling Chemical Leasing businessmodels solely on the grounds of economic and ecological considerations falls short of branding it as a corporate social responsibility initiative, which, for this paper, is defined as a stakeholder-oriented concept that extends beyond the organization's boundaries and is driven by an ethical understanding of the organization's responsibility for the impact of its business activities. For the analysis of Chemical Leasing businessmodels, we introduce two case studies from the water purification and metal degreasing fields, focusing on employees and local communities as two specific stakeholder groups of the company introducing Chemical Leasing. The paper seeks to demonstrate that Chemical Leasing businessmodels can be branded as a corporate social responsibility initiative by outlining the vast potential of Chemical Leasing to improve occupational health and safety and to strengthen the ability of companies to protect the environment from the adverse effects of the chemicals they apply. PMID:24943884

Greater investment is required in developing new drugs and vaccines against malaria in order to eradicate malaria. These precious funds must be carefully managed to achieve the greatest impact. We evaluate existing efforts to discover and develop new drugs and vaccines for malaria to determine how best malaria R&D can benefit from an enhanced open source approach and how such a businessmodel may operate. We assess research articles, patents, clinical trials and conducted a smaller survey among malaria researchers. Our results demonstrate that the public and philanthropic sectors are financing and performing the majority of malaria drug/vaccine discovery and development, but are then restricting access through patents, ‘closed’ publications and hidden away physical specimens. This makes little sense since it is also the public and philanthropic sector that purchases the drugs and vaccines. We recommend that a more “open source” approach is taken by making the entire value chain more efficient through greater transparency which may lead to more extensive collaborations. This can, for example, be achieved by empowering an existing organization like the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) to act as a clearing house for malaria-related data. The malaria researchers that we surveyed indicated that they would utilize such registry data to increase collaboration. Finally, we question the utility of publicly or philanthropically funded patents for malaria medicines, where little to no profits are available. Malaria R&D benefits from a publicly and philanthropically funded architecture, which starts with academic research institutions, product development partnerships, commercialization assistance through UNITAID and finally procurement through mechanisms like The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the U.S.’ President’s Malaria Initiative. We believe that a fresh look should be taken at the cost/benefit of patents particularly related to new

Greater investment is required in developing new drugs and vaccines against malaria in order to eradicate malaria. These precious funds must be carefully managed to achieve the greatest impact. We evaluate existing efforts to discover and develop new drugs and vaccines for malaria to determine how best malaria R&D can benefit from an enhanced open source approach and how such a businessmodel may operate. We assess research articles, patents, clinical trials and conducted a smaller survey among malaria researchers. Our results demonstrate that the public and philanthropic sectors are financing and performing the majority of malaria drug/vaccine discovery and development, but are then restricting access through patents, 'closed' publications and hidden away physical specimens. This makes little sense since it is also the public and philanthropic sector that purchases the drugs and vaccines. We recommend that a more "open source" approach is taken by making the entire value chain more efficient through greater transparency which may lead to more extensive collaborations. This can, for example, be achieved by empowering an existing organization like the Medicines for Malaria Venture (MMV) to act as a clearing house for malaria-related data. The malaria researchers that we surveyed indicated that they would utilize such registry data to increase collaboration. Finally, we question the utility of publicly or philanthropically funded patents for malaria medicines, where little to no profits are available. Malaria R&D benefits from a publicly and philanthropically funded architecture, which starts with academic research institutions, product development partnerships, commercialization assistance through UNITAID and finally procurement through mechanisms like The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and the U.S.' President's Malaria Initiative. We believe that a fresh look should be taken at the cost/benefit of patents particularly related to new malaria

Organizations constantly strive to improve their business performance; hence they make business process redesign efforts. So far, redesign has mainly been a human task, which relies on human reasoning and creativity, although various analysis tools can support it by identifying improvement opportunities. This chapter proposes an automated approach for learning from accumulated experience and improving business processes over time. The approach ties together three aspects of business processes: goals, context, and actual paths. It proposes a learning cycle, including a learning phase, where the relevant context is identified and used for making improvements in the process model, and a runtime application phase, where the improved process model is applied at runtime and actual results are stored for the next learning cycle. According to our approach, a goal-oriented process model is essential for learning to improve process outcomes.

... 25 Indians 1 2013-04-01 2013-04-01 false Is there a modelbusiness lease form? 162.402 Section 162... Business Leases Business Leasing General Provisions § 162.402 Is there a modelbusiness lease form? There is no modelbusiness lease form because of the need for flexibility in negotiating and...

... 25 Indians 1 2014-04-01 2014-04-01 false Is there a modelbusiness lease form? 162.402 Section 162... Business Leases Business Leasing General Provisions § 162.402 Is there a modelbusiness lease form? There is no modelbusiness lease form because of the need for flexibility in negotiating and...

Because about 83.6 billion won worth coins are not collected annually, 35 billion won of government money is being wasted for producing new coins in Korea. In order to improve unnecessary government money leakage, we now have to develop a proper way of managing small valued money such as coins. We have already developed the coin ATM to solve such problem in the previous study. In this study, we proposed businessmodel, which enables users to deposit or consume such small amount of money with the coin ATM. The proposed businessmodel has advantages that enable to connect various payment system and is efficient to consume such small amount of money. This businessmodel improves not only the way of managing small valued money but also the way of consuming small valued money. Furthermore, our businessmodel can contribute to activating circulation of coins as well as preventing leakage of government money.

Presents the model of the Information Service of the Wisconsin Small Business Development Center Information Service, including the objectives and tasks necessary to develop an information service, and staffing and funding guidelines for the first two years. (EJS)

This article explains the use of a specific computer-based simulation program as a successful experiential learning model and as a way to increase student motivation while augmenting conventional methods of business instruction. This model is based on established adult learning principles.

This study reports the results of a comparative study of American business schools and Australian schools of commerce regarding utilization of field-based consultancy and associated critical variables. Respondents in the survey were 141 deans of Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accredited business schools in the United…

The business failure of numerous companies results in financial crises. The high social costs associated with such crises have made people to search for effective tools for business risk prediction, among which, support vector machine is very effective. Several modelling means, including single-technique modelling, hybrid modelling, and ensemble modelling, have been suggested in forecasting business risk with support vector machine. However, existing literature seldom focuses on the general modelling frame for business risk prediction, and seldom investigates performance differences among different modelling means. We reviewed researches on forecasting business risk with support vector machine, proposed the general assisted prediction modelling frame with hybridisation and ensemble (APMF-WHAE), and finally, investigated the use of principal components analysis, support vector machine, random sampling, and group decision, under the general frame in forecasting business risk. Under the APMF-WHAE frame with support vector machine as the base predictive model, four specific predictive models were produced, namely, pure support vector machine, a hybrid support vector machine involved with principal components analysis, a support vector machine ensemble involved with random sampling and group decision, and an ensemble of hybrid support vector machine using group decision to integrate various hybrid support vector machines on variables produced from principle components analysis and samples from random sampling. The experimental results indicate that hybrid support vector machine and ensemble of hybrid support vector machines were able to produce dominating performance than pure support vector machine and support vector machine ensemble.

Two time-accurate Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes were used to compute several flutter points for a typical business jet model. The model consisted of a rigid fuselage with a flexible semispan wing and was tested in the Transonic Dynamics Tunnel at NASA Langley Research Center where experimental flutter data were obtained from M(sub infinity) = 0.628 to M(sub infinity) = 0.888. The computational results were computed using CFD codes based on the inviscid TSD equation (CAP-TSD) and the Euler/Navier-Stokes equations (CFL3D-AE). Comparisons are made between analytical results and with experiment where appropriate. The results presented here show that the Navier-Stokes method is required near the transonic dip due to the strong viscous effects while the TSD and Euler methods used here provide good results at the lower Mach numbers.

Team-based learning (TBL) is an approach that builds on both the case method and problem-based learning and has been widely adopted in the sciences and healthcare disciplines. In recent years business disciplines have also discovered the value of this approach. One of the key characteristics of the team-based learning approach consists of…

Modern goal-oriented requirements engineering frameworks use modeling as a means of better understanding a domain, leading to an overall improvement in the quality of the requirements. Regulations and laws impose additional context and constraints on software goals and can limit the satisfaction of stakeholder needs. Organizations and software developers need modeling tools that can properly address the potential deep impact legal issues can have on the effectiveness of business strategies. In this paper, we perform a preliminary study into the development of a modeling framework able to support the analysis of legal prescriptions alongside business strategies. We demonstrate, via an example drawn from a case study of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), how models of this law can be built with the GRL modeling language and how they can be evaluated as part of the business goal models.

The efficiency of enterprises can be improved and made more competitive by e-business. Consequently, e-business is developing in a swift and violent manner as a new type of business mode all over the world. But with the rapid increase of information on the Internet, the traditional technology cannot meet the requirement of information development well. Soon, high-efficient e-business system needs to be set up by a new kind of technology. Since the agent has the characteristic of movement, cooperation as well as some intelligence, it can compensate the shortcoming of the current e-business system. So how to lead the agent into e-business soon becomes the focus of academic and enterprises. This chapter analyzes the existing electronic business mode and designs a kind of the electronic businessmodelbased on the agent intelligence. It searches the goods information that match the customer request and negotiates goods price and the bargain conditions with seller, and recommends reasonable goods for the double win both the customer and the safer. The language of the system development is Java and use the B/S structure.

The Arizona Telemedicine Program (ATP) was established in 1996 when state funding was provided to implement eight telemedicine sites. Since then the ATP has expanded to connect 55 health-care organizations through a membership programme formalized through legal contracts. The ATP's membership model is based on an application service provider (ASP) concept, whereby organizations can share services at lower cost; that is, the ATP acts as a broker for services. The membership fee schedule is flexible, allowing clients to purchase only those services desired. An annual membership fee is paid by every user, based on the services requested. The membership programme income has provided a steady revenue stream for the ATP. The membership-derived revenue represented 30% of the ATP's 2.6 million dollars total income during fiscal year 2003/04. PMID:16356313

What is the business of business? How can planners and investors anticipate the true chances of failure and success of a business idea? This article describes a rationale for developing successful new business on the basis of a simple, sensible idea: the business of any business is to make its clients successful enough to continue purchasing and…

This paper examines the structural relationships between Information Technology (IT) governance and Enterprise Architecture (EA), with the objective of enhancing business value in the enterprise society. Structural models consisting of four related hypotheses reveal the relationship between IT governance and EA in the improvement of business values. We statistically examined the hypotheses by analyzing validated questionnaire items from respondents within firms listed on the Japanese stock exchange who were qualified to answer them. We concluded that firms which have organizational ability controlled by IT governance are more likely to deliver business value based on IT portfolio management.

Wearable sensor technologies used to track daily activities have become successful in the consumer market. In order for wearable sensor technology to offer added value in the more challenging areas of stress-rehab care and occupational health stress-related biofeedback parameters need to be monitored and more elaborate businessmodels are needed. To identify probable success factors for a wearable biofeedback system (Affective Health) in the two mentioned market segments in a Swedish setting, we conducted literature studies and interviews with relevant representatives. Data were collected and used first to describe the two market segments and then to define likely feasible businessmodel designs, according to the BusinessModel Canvas framework. Needs of stakeholders were identified as inputs to businessmodel design. Value propositions, a key building block of a businessmodel, were defined for each segment. The value proposition for occupational health was defined as "A tool that can both identify employees at risk of stress-related disorders and reinforce healthy sustainable behavior" and for healthcare as: "Providing therapists with objective data about the patient's emotional state and motivating patients to better engage in the treatment process". PMID:25980872

Today, the B2B e-business systems in most enterprises usually have multiple heterogeneous and independent systems which are based on different platforms and operate in different functional departments. To deal with the increased services in future, an enterprise needs to expand its system continuously. This, however, will cause great inconvenience to the future system maintenance. To implement e-business successfully, a unified internal e-business integration environment must be established to integrate the internal system and thus realize a unified internal mechanism within the enterprise e-business system. The SOA (service-oriented architecture), however, can well meet the above requirements. The integration of SOA-based applications can reduce the dependency of different types of IT systems, reduce the cost of system maintenance and the complexity of the IT system operation, increase the flexibility of the system deployment, and at the same time exclude the barrier of service innovation. Research and application of SOA-based enterprise application systems has become a very important research project at present. Based on SOA, this document designs an enterprise e-business application model and realizes a flexible and expandable e-business platform.

This bulletin provides descriptions of two of the most widely used business and industry quality models--the British Standards Institution system (BS5750) and Total Quality Management (TQM). The focus is on applications of the models in further education colleges. The first section clarifies what the term "quality" means, in general and in the two…

In this paper we analyze quantitatively a businessmodel for the collaborative provision of an advanced mobile data service portfolio composed of three multimedia services: Video on Demand, Internet Protocol Television and User Generated Content. We provide a description of the provision system considering the relation occurring between tecnical aspects and business aspects for each agent providing the basic multimedia service. Such a techno-business analysis is then projected into a mathematical model dealing with the problem of the definition of incentives between the different agents involved in a collaborative service provision. Through the implementation of this model we aim at shaping the behaviour of each of the contributing agents modifying the level of profitability that the Service Portfolio yields to each of them.

Model-driven software development enables users to specify an application at a high level - a level that better matches problem domain. It also promises the users with better analysis and automation. Our work embarks on two collaborating domains - business process and human interactions - to build an application. Businessmodeling expresses business operations and flows then creates business flow implementation. Human interaction modeling expresses a UI design, its relationship with business data, logic, and flow, and can generate working UI. This double modeling approach automates the production of a working system with UI and business logic connected. This paper discusses the human aspects of this modeling approach after a year long of building a procurement outsourcing contract application using the approach - the result of which was deployed in December 2008. The paper discusses in multiple areas the happy endings and some heartache. We end with insights on how a model-driven approach could do better for humans in the process.

The importance of active student involvement is stressed in this discussion of a competency-based approach to career exploration. Five steps used in developing a one-semester, eighth-grade business exploration course are presented and described. Methods of teaching such a unit and advantages to this approach are discussed. (CT)

Most of today’s products and services are software-based. Organizations that develop software want to maintain and improve their competitiveness by controlling software-related risks. To do this, they need to align their business goals with software development strategies and translate them into quantitative project management. There is also an increasing need to justify cost and resources for software and system development and other IT services by demonstrating their impact on an organization’s higher-level goals. For both, linking business goals and software-related efforts in an organization is necessary. However, this is a challenging task, and there is a lack of methods addressing this gap.

Business process modelling (BPM) has become fundamental for modern enterprises due to the increasing rate of organisational change. As a consequence, business processes need to be continuously (re-)designed as well as subsequently aligned with the corresponding enterprise information systems. One major problem associated with the design of business processes is reusability. Reuse of business process models has the potential of increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of BPM. This article critically surveys the existing literature on the problem of BPM reusability and more specifically on that State-of-the-Art research that can provide or suggest the 'elements' required for the development of a methodology aimed at discovering reusable conceptual artefacts in the form of patterns. The article initially clarifies the definitions of business process and business process model; then, it sets out to explore the previous research conducted in areas that have an impact on reusability in BPM. The article concludes by distilling directions for future research towards the development of apatterns-based approach to BPM; an approach that brings together the contributions made by the research community in the areas of process mining and discovery, declarative approaches and ontologies.

South Carolina State Dept. of Education, Columbia. Div. of Public Accountability.

This report describes 38 model school-business partnerships that are being conducted in South Carolina. The 38 reports were gathered from 24 school districts and 3 statewide projects. Criteria for selection were that the partnerships must be in some way exemplary of the program and the school district must have reported in some detail their…

The global economic recession has caused students, parents, and policymakers to reevaluate personal and societal investments in higher education--and has prompted the realization that traditional higher ed "businessmodels" may be unsustainable. Predicting a shakeout, most presidents expressed confidence for their own school's ability to…

In this article, the author addresses questions about the future of faculty unions, businessmodels, and the academy by providing some current and historical context regarding the causes of and conflicts about faculty unions. He also reviews trends in college and university management over the past three decades, using California, Ohio, and…

Colleges and universities are thinking strategically about their businessmodels. Reductions in state and federal appropriations, endowment volatility, fundraising uncertainties, and limits on tuition increases are creating persistent shortfalls in operating budgets. This all comes when institutions are being called upon to enroll and graduate…

Managing a group practice effectively can improve the practice's bottom line as well as attract a capital partner, if necessary. By addressing issues such as culture, values, governance, role definition, and expectations, group practices can clarify their vision and goals and run their business in an organized, efficient manner. When a group practice's physicians are committed to the success of the practice, they can work as a team to implement efficient operational procedures and optimize revenues. Effective businessmodel components should be considered by both fledgling and mature practices. PMID:11066683

Responses from 254 of 990 Association for Business Communication Members revealed that only 11% used competency-based instruction to teach business/management communication. Barriers to use included satisfaction with traditional instruction, lack of knowledge, lack of incentives/resources, difficulty scheduling facilities, and student inability to…

Compliance with regulatory and governance standards is rapidly becoming one of the hot topics of information security today. This is because, especially with regulatory compliance, both business and government have to expect large financial and reputational losses if compliance cannot be ensured and demonstrated. One major difficulty of implementing such regulations is caused the fact that they are captured at a high level of abstraction that is business-centric and not IT centric. This means that the abstract intent needs to be translated in a trustworthy, traceable way into compliance and security policies that the IT security infrastructure can enforce. Carrying out this mapping process manually is time consuming, maintenance-intensive, costly, and error-prone. Compliance monitoring is also critical in order to be able to demonstrate compliance at any given point in time. The problem is further complicated because of the need for business-driven IT agility, where IT policies and enforcement can change frequently, e.g. Business Process Modelling (BPM) driven Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Model Driven Security (MDS) is an innovative technology approach that can solve these problems as an extension of identity and access management (IAM) and authorization management (also called entitlement management). In this paper we will illustrate the theory behind Model Driven Security for compliance, provide an improved and extended architecture, as well as a case study in the healthcare industry using our OpenPMF 2.0 technology.

Develops stochastic model of library borrowing using Negative Binomial distribution applied to circulation data obtained from Huddersfield Public Library. Evidence concerning process of popularity decay is presented and method is given by which relegation tests can be constructed to maintain optimum turnover. Eight references and statistical…

Calculus-basedbusiness mathematics is a required quantitative course for undergraduate business students in most AACSB accredited schools or colleges of business. Many business students, however, have relatively weak mathematical background or even display math-phobia when presented with calculus problems. Because of the popularity of Excel, its…

We propose a business scenario evaluation method using qualitative and quantitative hybrid model. In order to evaluate business factors with qualitative causal relations, we introduce statistical values based on propagation and combination of effects of business factors by Monte Carlo simulation. In propagating an effect, we divide a range of each factor by landmarks and decide an effect to a destination node based on the divided ranges. In combining effects, we decide an effect of each arc using contribution degree and sum all effects. Through applied results to practical models, it is confirmed that there are no differences between results obtained by quantitative relations and results obtained by the proposed method at the risk rate of 5%.

The paper develops a new model of the essential factors required to be a top business school in the world for the benefit of schools recognized by the Higher Education Commission (HEC) in Pakistan. Globally, top business schools are those that excel in research, attract strong faculty, and successfully foster student development. The present…

Videogames for health provide innovative, exciting, and possibly highly effective new media for helping players change their behaviors or otherwise benefit their health. Getting the right videogames into the hands of players who can benefit most in a way that pays for the continued innovation and creation of such games is a current challenge. Entertainment videogame companies, which create games primarily to enhance players' enjoyment, have used the general business marketplace (e.g., online stores, walk-in stores, app stores) to deliver their products directly to consumers and earn enough capital to invest in making new products. No one believes, however, that enough kids or adults would use the general business marketplace to purchase games for health in sufficient volume to provide the down payment for the innovation and creation of new games for health. A successful businessmodel is critical to the financial future of games for health. We asked members of our Editorial Board who are in health-related companies (Fikry Isaac, MD, MPH), in several game development companies (Chris Ashford, Ron Goldman, David J. Lenihan, Brent Poole, and Richard Buday, FAIA), and the head of the Games for Health Europe Foundation (Jurriaan van Rijswijk, MSc) to address questions in a roundtable about the current and possible future businessmodels for games for health. PMID:26192123

Considers electronic commerce as a paradigm shift, or a disruptive innovation, and presents an analytical framework based on the theories of transaction costs and switching costs. Topics include business transformation process; scale effect; scope effect; new sources of revenue; and e-commerce value creation model and strategy. (LRW)

This is a critical examination of the claims that innovations such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) will disrupt the businessmodels of the higher education sector. It describes what businessmodels are, analyses the businessmodel of free MOOCs offered by traditional universities and compares that model to that of paid online courses…

The R&D has been recognized as critical method to take competitiveness by not only companies but also nations with its value creation such as patent value and new product. Therefore, R&D has been a decision maker's burden in that it is hard to decide how much money to invest, how long time one should spend, and what technology to develop which means it accompanies resources such as budget, time, and manpower. Although there are diverse researches about R&D evaluation, business factors are not concerned enough because almost all previous studies are technology oriented evaluation with one R&D technology based. In that, we early proposed R&D business aspect evaluation model which consists of nine businessmodel components. In this research, we develop a simulation model and system evaluating a company or industry's R&D portfolio with businessmodel point of view and clarify default and control parameters to facilitate evaluator's business validity work in each evaluation module by integrate to one screen. PMID:25893209

The R&D has been recognized as critical method to take competitiveness by not only companies but also nations with its value creation such as patent value and new product. Therefore, R&D has been a decision maker's burden in that it is hard to decide how much money to invest, how long time one should spend, and what technology to develop which means it accompanies resources such as budget, time, and manpower. Although there are diverse researches about R&D evaluation, business factors are not concerned enough because almost all previous studies are technology oriented evaluation with one R&D technology based. In that, we early proposed R&D business aspect evaluation model which consists of nine businessmodel components. In this research, we develop a simulation model and system evaluating a company or industry's R&D portfolio with businessmodel point of view and clarify default and control parameters to facilitate evaluator's business validity work in each evaluation module by integrate to one screen. PMID:25893209

Reusing design models is an attractive approach in business process modeling as modeling efficiency and quality of design outcomes may be significantly improved. However, reusing conceptual models is not a cost-free effort, but has to be carefully designed. While factors such as psychological anchoring and task-adequacy in reuse-basedmodeling tasks have been investigated, information granularity as a cognitive concept has not been at the center of empirical research yet. We hypothesize that business process granularity as a factor in design tasks under reuse has a significant impact on the effectiveness of resulting business process models. We test our hypothesis in a comparative study employing high and low granularities. The reusable processes provided were taken from widely accessible reference models for the telecommunication industry (enhanced Telecom Operations Map). First experimental results show that Recall in tasks involving coarser granularity is lower than in cases of finer granularity. These findings suggest that decision makers in business process management should be considerate with regard to the implementation of reuse mechanisms of different granularities. We realize that due to our small sample size results are not statistically significant, but this preliminary run shows that it is ready for running on a larger scale.

This paper identifies three essential factors (information infrastructure, executive information system and a new manufacturing paradigm) that are used to support the development of a new businessmodel for competitiveness. They facilitate changes in organization structure in support of business transformation. A SME can source a good manufacturing practice using a model of academic-university collaboration to gain competitive advantage in the e-business world. The collaboration facilitates the change agents to use information systems development as a vehicle to increase the capability of executives in using information and knowledge management to gain higher responsiveness and customer satisfaction. The case company is used to illustrate the application of a web-based executive information system to interface internal communications with external operation. It explains where a good manufacturing practice may be re-applied by other SMEs to acquire skills as a learning organization grows in an extended enterprise setting.

Aim To perform SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis of a clinical laboratory as an economic model that may be used to improve business performance of laboratories by removing weaknesses, minimizing threats, and using external opportunities and internal strengths. Methods Impact of possible threats to and weaknesses of the Clinical Laboratory at Našice General County Hospital business performance and use of strengths and opportunities to improve operating profit were simulated using models created on the basis of SWOT analysis results. The operating profit as a measure of profitability of the clinical laboratory was defined as total revenue minus total expenses and presented using a profit and loss account. Changes in the input parameters in the profit and loss account for 2008 were determined using opportunities and potential threats, and economic sensitivity analysis was made by using changes in the key parameters. The profit and loss account and economic sensitivity analysis were tools for quantifying the impact of changes in the revenues and expenses on the business operations of clinical laboratory. Results Results of simulation models showed that operational profit of €470 723 in 2008 could be reduced to only €21 542 if all possible threats became a reality and current weaknesses remained the same. Also, operational gain could be increased to €535 804 if laboratory strengths and opportunities were utilized. If both the opportunities and threats became a reality, the operational profit would decrease by €384 465. Conclusion The operational profit of the clinical laboratory could be significantly reduced if all threats became a reality and the current weaknesses remained the same. The operational profit could be increased by utilizing strengths and opportunities as much as possible. This type of modeling may be used to monitor business operations of any clinical laboratory and improve its financial situation by

... 47 Telecommunication 4 2011-10-01 2011-10-01 false Encoding rules for undefined businessmodels... for undefined businessmodels. (a) Upon public notice and subject to requirements as set forth herein, a covered entity may launch a program service pursuant to an undefined businessmodel. Subject...

... 47 Telecommunication 4 2014-10-01 2014-10-01 false Encoding rules for undefined businessmodels... for undefined businessmodels. (a) Upon public notice and subject to requirements as set forth herein, a covered entity may launch a program service pursuant to an undefined businessmodel. Subject...

... 47 Telecommunication 4 2013-10-01 2013-10-01 false Encoding rules for undefined businessmodels... for undefined businessmodels. (a) Upon public notice and subject to requirements as set forth herein, a covered entity may launch a program service pursuant to an undefined businessmodel. Subject...

... 47 Telecommunication 4 2012-10-01 2012-10-01 false Encoding rules for undefined businessmodels... for undefined businessmodels. (a) Upon public notice and subject to requirements as set forth herein, a covered entity may launch a program service pursuant to an undefined businessmodel. Subject...

This paper presents the comparison of smart meter deployment businessmodels to determine the most suitable option providing smart meters deployment. Authors consider 3 main businessmodel of companies: distribution grid company, energy supplier (energosbyt) and metering company. The goal of the article is to compare the businessmodels of power companies from massive smart metering roll out in power system of Russian Federation.

A survey of 287 business faculty found that few were infusing electronic commerce topics into existing curricula despite its growing use in business. Responses were similar regardless of faculty gender, region, and program size or level. (SK)

Although business intelligence (BI) technologies are continually evolving, the capability to apply BI technologies has become an indispensable resource for enterprises running in today's complex, uncertain and dynamic business environment. This study performed pioneering work by constructing models and rules for the prediction of business intelligence system effectiveness (BISE) in relation to the implementation of BI solutions. For enterprises, effectively managing critical attributes that determine BISE to develop prediction models with a set of rules for self-evaluation of the effectiveness of BI solutions is necessary to improve BI implementation and ensure its success. The main study findings identified the critical prediction indicators of BISE that are important to forecasting BI performance and highlighted five classification and prediction rules of BISE derived from decision tree structures, as well as a refined regression prediction model with four critical prediction indicators constructed by logistic regression analysis that can enable enterprises to improve BISE while effectively managing BI solution implementation and catering to academics to whom theory is important. PMID:27376005

Describes the development and outcomes of Lane Community College's (LCC) Business Assistance Center, which offers a wide range of management assistance services to local small businesses. Explains how state-funded programs, based on the LCC model, resulted in a network of Small Business Development Centers. (CBC)

We present an approach to the formal specification and automatic analysis of business processes under authorization constraints based on the action language \\cal{C}. The use of \\cal{C} allows for a natural and concise modeling of the business process and the associated security policy and for the automatic analysis of the resulting specification by using the Causal Calculator (CCALC). Our approach improves upon previous work by greatly simplifying the specification step while retaining the ability to perform a fully automatic analysis. To illustrate the effectiveness of the approach we describe its application to a version of a business process taken from the banking domain and use CCALC to determine resource allocation plans complying with the security policy.

The present study investigates pre-business students' reaction to Activity Based Learning in a lower division core required course entitled Introduction to Global Business in the business curriculum at California State University Chico. The study investigates students' preference for Activity Based Learning in comparison to a more traditional…

Describes business diplomacy based on the Japanese concept of kyosei (working for the common good). Gives case examples of application of principled diplomacy to ethical dilemmas and suggests ways to establish an organizational culture to support principled business leadership. (SK)

A collocation approach, based on a fourth order cubic B-splines is presented for the numerical solution of a Kaleckian business cycle model formulated by a nonlinear delay differential equation. The equation is approximated and the nonlinearity is handled by employing an iterative scheme arising from Newton's method. It is shown that the model exhibits a conditionally dynamical stable cycle. The fourth-order rate of convergence of the scheme is verified numerically for different special cases.

The two studies which received the 1975 Robert E. Slaughter Research Award in Business and Office Education are summarized in the document. The first paper, entitled "Effectiveness of Model Office, Cooperative Office Education, and Office Procedures Courses Based on Employee Satisfaction and Satisfactoriness Eighteen Months After Graduation,"…

Background It is acknowledged that the success and uptake of eHealth improve with the involvement of users and stakeholders to make technology reflect their needs. Involving stakeholders in implementation research is thus a crucial element in developing eHealth technology. Businessmodeling is an approach to guide implementation research for eHealth. Stakeholders are involved in businessmodeling by identifying relevant stakeholders, conducting value co-creation dialogs, and co-creating a businessmodel. Because implementation activities are often underestimated as a crucial step while developing eHealth, comprehensive and applicable approaches geared toward businessmodeling in eHealth are scarce. Objective This paper demonstrates the potential of several stakeholder-oriented analysis methods and their practical application was demonstrated using Infectionmanager as an example case. In this paper, we aim to demonstrate how businessmodeling, with the focus on stakeholder involvement, is used to co-create an eHealth implementation. Methods We divided businessmodeling in 4 main research steps. As part of stakeholder identification, we performed literature scans, expert recommendations, and snowball sampling (Step 1). For stakeholder analyzes, we performed “basic stakeholder analysis,” stakeholder salience, and ranking/analytic hierarchy process (Step 2). For value co-creation dialogs, we performed a process analysis and stakeholder interviews based on the businessmodel canvas (Step 3). Finally, for businessmodel generation, we combined all findings into the businessmodel canvas (Step 4). Results Based on the applied methods, we synthesized a step-by-step guide for businessmodeling with stakeholder-oriented analysis methods that we consider suitable for implementing eHealth. Conclusions The step-by-step guide for businessmodeling with stakeholder involvement enables eHealth researchers to apply a systematic and multidisciplinary, co-creative approach for

As the mantra "innovate your businessmodel or die" increases in popularity among practitioners and academics, so does the need for novel and feasible businessmodels. In this article, we describe an ideation experience workshop, conducted in an undergraduate business course, in which students, guided by their lecturers and two industry…

This article describes an architecture-based approach to IT valuation. This approach offers organisations an instrument to valuate their application and project portfolios and to make well-balanced decisions about IT investments. The value of a software application is assessed in terms of its contribution to a selection of business goals. Based on such assessments, the value of different applications can be compared, and requirements for innovation, development, maintenance and phasing out can be identified. IT projects are proposed to realise the requirements. The value of each project is assessed in terms of the value it adds to one or more applications. This value can be obtained by relating the 'as-is' application portfolio to the 'to-be' portfolio that is being proposed by the project portfolio. In this way, projects can be ranked according to their added value, given a certain selection of business goals. The approach uses ArchiMate to model the relationship between software applications, business processes, services and products. In addition, two language extensions are used to model the relationship of these elements to business goals and requirements and to projects and project portfolios. The approach is illustrated using the portfolio method of Bedell and has been implemented in BiZZdesign Architect.

The following study is an exploratory investigation into the opportunity identification, opportunity analysis, and strategic implications of implementing a cash-only family physician practice. The current market dynamics (i.e., increasing insurance premiums, decreasing benefits, more regulations and paperwork, and cuts in federal and state programs) suggest that there is sufficient motivation for these practitioners to change their current businessmodel. In-depth interviews were conducted with office managers and physicians of family physician practices. The results highlighted a variety of issues, including barriers to change, strategy issues, and opportunities/benefits. The implications include theory applications, strategic marketing applications, and managerial decision-making. PMID:23924222

Despite of growing oncology pipeline, cancer vaccines contribute only to a minor share of total oncology-attributed revenues. This is mainly because of a limited number of approved products and limited sales from products approved under compassionate or via early access entry in smaller and less developed markets. However revenue contribution from these products is extremely limited and it remains to be established whether developers are breaking even or achieving profitability with existing sales. Cancer vaccine field is well recognized for high development costs and risks, low historical rates of investment return and high probability of failures arising in ventures, partnerships and alliances. The cost of reimbursement for new oncology agents is not universally acceptable to payers limiting the potential for a global expansion, market access and reducing probability of commercial success. In addition, the innovation in cancer immunotherapy is currently focused in small and mid-size biotech companies and academic institutions struggling for investment. Existing R&D innovation models are deemed unsustainable in current "value-for-money" oriented healthcare environment. New businessmodels should be much more open to collaborative, networked and federated styles, which could help to outreach global, markets and increase cost-efficiencies across an entire value chain. Lessons learned from some developing countries and especially from South Korea illustrate that further growth of cancer vaccine industry will depends not only on new businessmodels but also will heavily rely on regional support and initiatives from different bodies, such as governments, payers and regulatory bodies. PMID:22894953

Despite of growing oncology pipeline, cancer vaccines contribute only to a minor share of total oncology-attributed revenues. This is mainly because of a limited number of approved products and limited sales from products approved under compassionate or via early access entry in smaller and less developed markets. However revenue contribution from these products is extremely limited and it remains to be established whether developers are breaking even or achieving profitability with existing sales. Cancer vaccine field is well recognized for high development costs and risks, low historical rates of investment return and high probability of failures arising in ventures, partnerships and alliances. The cost of reimbursement for new oncology agents is not universally acceptable to payers limiting the potential for a global expansion, market access and reducing probability of commercial success. In addition, the innovation in cancer immunotherapy is currently focused in small and mid-size biotech companies and academic institutions struggling for investment. Existing R&D innovation models are deemed unsustainable in current “value-for-money” oriented healthcare environment. New businessmodels should be much more open to collaborative, networked and federated styles, which could help to outreach global, markets and increase cost-efficiencies across an entire value chain. Lessons learned from some developing countries and especially from South Korea illustrate that further growth of cancer vaccine industry will depends not only on new businessmodels but also will heavily rely on regional support and initiatives from different bodies, such as governments, payers and regulatory bodies. PMID:22894953

There are many possible disruptions that can occur in business. Overlooking or under planning for Business Continuity requires time, understanding and careful planning. Business Continuity Management is far more than producing a document and declaring business continuity success. What is the recipe for businesses to achieve continuity management success? Application Impact Analysis is a method for understanding the unique Business Attributes. This AIA Cycle involves a risk based approach to understanding the business priority and considering business aspects such as Financial, Operational, Service Structure, Contractual Legal, and Brand. The output of this analysis provides a construct for viewing data, evaluating impact, and delivering results, for an approved valuation of Recovery Time Objectives (RTO). PMID:24578024

This study examined the essential skill sets needed to effectively perform as a school business official in New York State. This study surveyed 132 practicing school business officials across New York State and created a needs-based assessment of the competencies required to successfully perform as a New York State school business official. In…

The challenge for faculty teaching in Catholic Business Schools is how to integrate the University's Catholic heritage and tradition into the core business curriculum. Such integration is necessary if schools of business are to provide their students with a distinctive educational experience. The Living Asset Stewardship (LAS) philosophy of…

Presentation topics include: standards in a changing businessmodel, the new National Space Policy is driving change, a new paradigm for human spaceflight, consistency across standards, the purpose of standards, danger of over-prescriptive standards, a balance is needed (between prescriptive and general standards), enabling versus inhibiting, characteristics of success-oriented standards, characteristics of success-oriented standards, and conclusions. Additional slides include NASA Procedural Requirements 8705.2B identifies human rating standards and requirements, draft health and medical standards for human rating, what's been done, government oversight models, examples of consistency from anthropometry, examples of inconsistency from air quality and appendices of government and non-governmental human factors standards.

imaging, microbial detection and even the use of pharmaceuticals for radiation protection. The internal challenges through NASA@Work drew over 6000 participants across all NASA centers. Challenges conducted by each NASA center elicited ideas and solutions from several other NASA centers and demonstrated rapid and efficient participation from employees at multiple centers to contribute to problem solving. Finally, on January 19, 2011, the SLSD conducted a workshop on open collaboration and innovation strategies and best practices through the newly established NASA Human Health and Performance Center (NHHPC). Initial projects will be described leading to a new businessmodel for SLSD.

Recent developments in agent-basedmodeling as a method of systems analysis and optimization indicate that students in business analytics need an introduction to the terminology, concepts, and framework of agent-basedmodeling. This article presents an active learning exercise for MBA students in business analytics that demonstrates agent-based…

Expands Carl Hovland's Yale Communication Model to include dimensions which explain gender differences in speaker credibility in persuasive business communication, with support from the gender literature. (MS)

This document describes the development of an improved predictive model for coannular jet noise, including noise suppression modifications applicable to small supersonic-cruise aircraft such as the Supersonic Business Jet (SBJ), for NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC). For such aircraft a wide range of propulsion and integration options are under consideration. Thus there is a need for very versatile design tools, including a noise prediction model. The approach used is similar to that used with great success by the Modern Technologies Corporation (MTC) in developing a noise prediction model for two-dimensional mixer ejector (2DME) nozzles under the High Speed Research Program and in developing a more recent model for coannular nozzles over a wide range of conditions. If highly suppressed configurations are ultimately required, the 2DME model is expected to provide reasonable prediction for these smaller scales, although this has not been demonstrated. It is considered likely that more modest suppression approaches, such as dual stream nozzles featuring chevron or chute suppressors, perhaps in conjunction with inverted velocity profiles (IVP), will be sufficient for the SBJ.

This article describes a six-week long exercise that incorporates a dynamic learning approach into an e-commerce or Internet technology business law elective course; the exercise pursues an entrepreneurial approach to the use of an appropriate businessmodel by emphasizing the interaction between technology, business, and law. This active learning…

Developed to assist those who are engaged in implementing prevocational exploration programs concerned with business and office occupations, this second part of a two-part curriculum guide consists of experiential learning pacs that sample a variety of competencies performed by various workers employed in the business and office cluster. The…

This curriculum guide is the first part of a two-part volume developed to assist those who are engaged in implementing prevocational exploration programs concerned with business and office occupations. It consists of experiential learning pacs that sample a variety of competencies performed by various workers employed in the business and office…

This paper examines the semantic associations of words found in the business lexical environment by using a one-million word corpus of both spoken and written Business English. The key method of analysis is that of semantic prosody or semantic association; the notion that words associate with collocates that are themselves related, often either…

This is a curriculum guide for a course designed to enable students to master the necessary basic mathematics and business-related mathematics skills needed for entry into office and business occupations. The guide includes 11 instructional units: (1) "Fundamental Math Skills"; (2) "Fractions"; (3) "Decimals"; (4) "Percentages and Ratios"; (5)…

Brands are fundamentally about experiences and relationships, and therefore they form prime basis of an institution's connection with their stakeholders. With the mushrooming of business schools (both private autonomous and government supported) and fading global boundaries, especially in the Indian context, communicating a business school…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to show that most small business owner-managers are technically competent in their area of business activity however they do not always have equal managerial competence. For example, deficiency in human resource management competence may lead to difficulties in attracting, retaining or leading staff. These…

Creation of business plans helps entrepreneurs in managing identification of business opportunities and committing necessary resources for process evolution. Applying patterns in business plan creation facilitates the identification of effective solutions that were adopted in the past and may provide a basis for adopting similar solutions in the future within given business context. The article presents the system design of an information portal for business plan co-creation based on patterns. The portal is going to provide start-up and entrepreneurs with ready-to-modify business plan patterns in order to help them in development of effective and efficient business plans. It will facilitate entrepreneurs in co-experimenting and co-learning more frequently and faster. Moreover, the paper focuses on the software architecture of the pattern based portal and explains the functionality of its modules, namely the pattern designer, pattern repository services and agent-based pattern implementers. It explains their role for business process co-creation, storing and managing patterns described formally, and selecting patterns best suited for specific business case. Thus, innovative entrepreneurs will be guided by the portal in co-writing winning business plans and staying competitive in the present day dynamic globalized environment.

Creation of business plans helps entrepreneurs in managing identification of business opportunities and committing necessary resources for process evolution. Applying patterns in business plan creation facilitates the identification of effective solutions that were adopted in the past and may provide a basis for adopting similar solutions in the future within given business context. The article presents the system design of an information portal for business plan co-creation based on patterns. The portal is going to provide start-up and entrepreneurs with ready-to-modify business plan patterns in order to help them in development of effective and efficient business plans. It will facilitate entrepreneurs in co-experimenting and co-learning more frequently and faster. Moreover, the paper focuses on the software architecture of the pattern based portal and explains the functionality of its modules, namely the pattern designer, pattern repository services and agent-based pattern implementers. It explains their role for business process co-creation, storing and managing patterns described formally, and selecting patterns best suited for specific business case. Thus, innovative entrepreneurs will be guided by the portal in co-writing winning business plans and staying competitive in the present day dynamic globalized environment.

Competitiveness is important characteristics of each business organization (firm, company, corporation etc). It is of great significance for the organization existence and defines evaluation criteria of business success at microeconomical level. Each criterium comprises set of indicators with specific weight coefficients. In the work an ontology-basedmodel of firm competitiveness is presented as a set of several mutually connected ontologies. It would be useful for knowledge structuring, standardization and sharing among experts and software engineers who develop application in the domain. Then the assessment of the competitiveness of various business organizations could be generated more effectively.

Today's EPOs and their physicians face an array of daunting challenges. Falling reimbursement, rising malpractice costs. ED and hospital crowding,and demands for improving ED efficiency and patient satisfaction all contribute to the challenging and sometimes threatening environment of EM practice. The EP involved in a busy and often hectic ED shift may feel unduly and unnecessarily distracted when required to continuously acknowledge and address the business aspect of the practice. Nevertheless,regardless of the size and structure, fiscal viability ultimately determines the EPO's ability to continue to offer access to care. This article contends that a comprehensive business strategy drives superior financial performance and supports the organization's mission. The business strategy must identify financial and non-financial determinants of the EPO's success and provide a mechanism for understanding how the organization's resources are converted to value for customers. The section offers a framework for developing this strategy, for identifying possible gaps or deficiencies, and for measuring and monitoring progress in achieving strategic objectives and ultimately, the EPO's mission. The importance of the mission and the dynamic EM environment require that the strategy development process be more than an annual exercise for the leadership of the organization. Though key leaders in any size EPO--set the course for the organization, the entire organization must be aware and understand the strategy before they commit themselves and adopt actions and behaviors that promote it. The model presented here provides a graphic display that lends itself well to consistent communication of a comprehensive strategy in a concise way throughout the organization.Furthermore, the balance of the model, across four perspectives, recognizes the value of balanced organizational objectives and lends itself well to the creation of a measurement system that supports cause and effect

Due to e-business's variety of customers with different navigational patterns and demands, multi-class queuing network is a natural performance model for it. The open multi-class queuing network(QN) models are based on the assumption that no service center is saturated as a result of the combined loads of all the classes. Several formulas are used to calculate performance measures, including throughput, residence time, queue length, response time and the average number of requests. The solution technique of closed multi-class QN models is an approximate mean value analysis algorithm (MVA) based on three key equations, because the exact algorithm needs huge time and space requirement. As mixed multi-class QN models, include some open and some closed classes, the open classes should be eliminated to create a closed multi-class QN so that the closed model algorithm can be applied. Some corresponding examples are given to show how to apply the algorithms mentioned in this article. These examples indicate that multi-class QN is a reasonably accurate model of e-business and can be solved efficiently. PMID:14663849

A market-driven, community-based, competitive health care model has effectively assisted Memphis employers to achieve their cost containment and health care reform objectives. Members of the Memphis Business Group on Health joined forces and successfully implemented a variety of programs and services that resulted in dramatic cost savings and reform of health care delivery systems. Programs included development of a purchasing alliance for negotiating contracts for hospital, medical, workers' compensation, psychiatric, and substance abuse care and other service and product options. Utilization management programs focused on appropriate consumption of resources and intensive management of critical cases. While increases in per employee costs averaged 14.7 percent per year for five years nationally, members of the Memphis Business Group on Health held their increases to an average of 6 percent per year. PMID:10132786

Office Automation by electronic text processing has not reduced the amount of paper used for communication and storage. The present boom of FAX-Systems proves this tendency. With this growing degree of office automation the paper-computer interface becomes increasingly important. To be useful, this interface must be able to handle documents containing text as well as graphics, and convert them into an electronic representation that not only captures content (like in current OCR readers), but also the layout and logic structure. We describe a system for the analysis of business letters which is able to extract the key elements of a letter like its sender, the date, etc. The letter can thus for instance be stored in electronic archival systems, edited by structure editors, or forwarded via electronic mail services. This system was implemented on a Symbolics Lisp machine for the high level part of the analysis and on a VAX for the low and medium level processing stages. Some practical results are presented and discussed. Apart from this application our system is a useful testbed to implement and test sophisticated control structures and model representations for image understanding.

Business practices are a constant matter of discussion by ethical theorists concerned with the conflicts between profitability and justice (Cherry, Lee, & Chien, 2003). Business decisions are complex and hence likely to be compromised by low-quality or questionable strategies (Carpenter & Sanders, 2008). The line between misbehavior and legal…

South Carolina State Dept. of Education, Columbia. Div. of Public Accountability.

This document contains reports from school districts in South Carolina on the status of their successful partnerships between schools and businesses. They are examples of what is happening in South Carolina today and what could happen between other businesses and schools as new alliances are formed. These accounts describe new ideas for…

In order to strengthen cooperation among institutions of higher education and businesses with global connections in Silicon Valley, a project was undertaken by San Jose City College to compile a list of the internationally oriented business-related courses available at local institutions and identify existing gaps in the curricula. Information…

Between 2012 and 2014 an industrial consortium led by Reaction Engines conducted a feasibility study for the European Space Agency with the objective to explore the feasibility of SKYLON as the basis for a launcher that meets the requirements established for the Next Generation European Launcher. SKYLON is a fully reusable single stage to orbit launch system that is enabled by the unique performance characteristic of the Synergetic Air-Breathing Rocket Engine and is under active development. The purpose of the study which was called "SKYLON-based European Launch Service Operator (S-ELSO)" was to support ESA decision making on launch service strategy by exploring the potential implications of this new launch system on future European launch capability and the European industry that supports it. The study explored both a SKYLON operator (S-ELSO) and SKYLON manufacturer as separate business ventures. In keeping with previous studies, the only strategy that was found that kept the purchase price of the SKYLON low enough for a viable operator business was to follow an "airline" businessmodel where the manufacturer sells SKYLONs to other operators in addition to S-ELSO. With the assumptions made in the study it was found that the SKYLON manufacturer with a total production run of between 30 and 100 SKYLONs could expect an Internal Rate of Return of around 10%. This was judged too low for all the funding to come from commercial funding sources, but is sufficiently high for a Public Private Partnership. The S-ELSO businessmodel showed that the Internal Rate of Return would be high enough to consider operating without public support (i.e. commercial in operation, irrespective of any public funding of development), even when the average launch price is lowered to match the lowest currently quoted price for expendable systems.

Purpose: The purpose of this research is to evaluate and investigate the most suitable model required for teaching business Management curriculum. The paper will report a new dimension of Business Management Teaching. For this purpose, a Practical teaching & Learning Model has been prepared and will be discussed through qualitative research…

E-learning is not just an application of technology to teaching, but a new businessmodel for higher education. By approaching e-learning as a businessmodel, educational policymakers can begin to appreciate the scope of the integrated technology and services required to run a successful online degree programme or a blended programme that includes…

A search of scholarly business journals identified 54 articles in business-related disciplines since 1980 using Geerte Hofstede's model of national culture as a research technique. Of those, 22 analyses were at the level of country, 12 at the organizational level, 20 at the individual level. The model's successful use to conduct both empirical and…

The canonical neoclassical model is insufficient to understand business cycle fluctuations in emerging market and developing economies. The author reformulates the model proposed by Aguiar and Gopinath (2007) in a simple setting that can be used to teach business cycle macroeconomics for emerging market and developing economies at the…

Smaller firms are the majority in every industry in the US, and they endure a greater burden of occupational injuries, illnesses, and fatalities than larger firms. Smaller firms often lack the necessary resources for effective occupational safety and health activities, and many require external assistance with safety and health programming. Based on previous work by researchers in Europe and New Zealand, NIOSH researchers developed for occupational safety and health intervention in small businesses. This model was evaluated with several intermediary organizations. Four case studies which describe efforts to reach small businesses with occupational safety and health assistance include the following: trenching safety training for construction, basic compliance and hazard recognition for general industry, expanded safety and health training for restaurants, and fall prevention and respirator training for boat repair contractors. Successful efforts included participation by the initiator among the intermediaries’ planning activities, alignment of small business needs with intermediary offerings, continued monitoring of intermediary activities by the initiator, and strong leadership for occupational safety and health among intermediaries. Common challenges were a lack of resources among intermediaries, lack of opportunities for in-person meetings between intermediaries and the initiator, and balancing the exchanges in the initiator–intermediary–small business relationships. The model offers some encouragement that initiator organizations can contribute to sustainable OSH assistance for small firms, but they must depend on intermediaries who have compatible interests in smaller businesses and they must work to understand the small business social system. PMID:26300585

The omnipresent need for optimisation requires constant improvements of companies’ business processes (BPs). Minimising the risk of inappropriate BP being implemented is usually performed by simulating the newly developed BP under various initial conditions and “what-if” scenarios. An effectual business process simulations software (BPSS) is a prerequisite for accurate analysis of an BP. Characterisation of an BPSS tool is a challenging task due to the complex selection criteria that includes quality of visual aspects, simulation capabilities, statistical facilities, quality reporting etc. Under such circumstances, making an optimal decision is challenging. Therefore, various decision support models are employed aiding the BPSS tool selection. The currently established decision support models are either proprietary or comprise only a limited subset of criteria, which affects their accuracy. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes a new hierarchical decision support model for ranking of BPSS based on their technical characteristics by employing DEX and qualitative to quantitative (QQ) methodology. Consequently, the decision expert feeds the required information in a systematic and user friendly manner. There are three significant contributions of the proposed approach. Firstly, the proposed hierarchical model is easily extendible for adding new criteria in the hierarchical structure. Secondly, a fully operational decision support system (DSS) tool that implements the proposed hierarchical model is presented. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical model is assessed by comparing the resulting rankings of BPSS with respect to currently available results. PMID:26871694

The omnipresent need for optimisation requires constant improvements of companies' business processes (BPs). Minimising the risk of inappropriate BP being implemented is usually performed by simulating the newly developed BP under various initial conditions and "what-if" scenarios. An effectual business process simulations software (BPSS) is a prerequisite for accurate analysis of an BP. Characterisation of an BPSS tool is a challenging task due to the complex selection criteria that includes quality of visual aspects, simulation capabilities, statistical facilities, quality reporting etc. Under such circumstances, making an optimal decision is challenging. Therefore, various decision support models are employed aiding the BPSS tool selection. The currently established decision support models are either proprietary or comprise only a limited subset of criteria, which affects their accuracy. Addressing this issue, this paper proposes a new hierarchical decision support model for ranking of BPSS based on their technical characteristics by employing DEX and qualitative to quantitative (QQ) methodology. Consequently, the decision expert feeds the required information in a systematic and user friendly manner. There are three significant contributions of the proposed approach. Firstly, the proposed hierarchical model is easily extendible for adding new criteria in the hierarchical structure. Secondly, a fully operational decision support system (DSS) tool that implements the proposed hierarchical model is presented. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed hierarchical model is assessed by comparing the resulting rankings of BPSS with respect to currently available results. PMID:26871694

Background Process orientation is one of the essential elements of quality management systems, including those in use in healthcare. Business processes in hospitals are very complex and variable. BPMN (Business Process Modelling Notation) is a user-oriented language specifically designed for the modelling of business (organizational) processes. Previous experiences of the use of this notation in the processes modelling within the Pathology in Spain or another country are not known. We present our experience in the elaboration of the conceptual models of Pathology processes, as part of a global programmed surgical patient process, using BPMN. Methods With the objective of analyzing the use of BPMN notation in real cases, a multidisciplinary work group was created, including software engineers from the Dep. of Technologies and Information Systems from the University of Castilla-La Mancha and health professionals and administrative staff from the Hospital General de Ciudad Real. The work in collaboration was carried out in six phases: informative meetings, intensive training, process selection, definition of the work method, process describing by hospital experts, and process modelling. Results The modelling of the processes of Anatomic Pathology is presented using BPMN. The presented subprocesses are those corresponding to the surgical pathology examination of the samples coming from operating theatre, including the planning and realization of frozen studies. Conclusion The modelling of Anatomic Pathology subprocesses has allowed the creation of an understandable graphical model, where management and improvements are more easily implemented by health professionals. PMID:18673511

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) models, which were first applied in business, are critical to making new technology-based learning paradigms and flexible learning environments a reality. The following are among the factors that have facilitated CQI's application in education: increased operating costs; increased competition from private…

A company must be able to describe and react against any endogenous or exogenous event. Such flexibility can be achieved through business process management (BPM). Nevertheless a BPM approach highlights complex relations between business and IT domains. A non-alignment is exposed between heterogeneous models: this is the 'business-IT gap' as described in the literature. Through concepts from business engineering and information systems driven by models and IT, we define a generic approach ensuring multi-view consistency. Its role is to maintain and provide all information related to the structure and semantic of models. Allowing the full return of a transformed model in the sense of reverse engineering, our platform enables synchronisation between analysis model and implementation model.

MATLAB is a powerful package for numerical computation. MATLAB contains a rich pool of mathematical functions and provides flexible plotting functions for illustrating mathematical solutions. The course of calculus-basedbusiness mathematics consists of two major topics: 1) derivative and its applications in business; and 2) integration and its…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to extend previous scholarly writing on community service-learning (SL) initiatives by looking beyond their use in the not-for-profit sector to their potential use in community-based small businesses. Design/methodology/approach: A rationale for the appropriateness of using SL projects in small businesses is…

The purpose of the study was to rank institutions based on productivity of faculty in four business education journals. Ninety-six issues were analyzed; these issues contained 947 articles authored by 1,234 individuals affiliated with colleges, universities, public schools, and private businesses. (Author/CH)

GDUFS, as one of China's top three foreign language universities with the longest history in business English teaching, has accumulated over 20-year experiences in this discipline. This research reflects into its business English teaching practices based on its graduates' employment status in recent years, and concludes that the students of…

This article makes two contributions to the teaching of business ethics literature. First, it describes the steps involved in developing effective ethical dilemmas to incorporate into a computer-basedbusiness simulation. Second, it illustrates these steps by presenting two ethical dilemmas that an instructor can incorporate into any business…

Of 252 rural Alberta attendees of home-basedbusiness workshops, 60 were in business. Of these, 65 percent produced sewing, textile, or food-related products; 73 percent contributed less than 5 percent of family income; 72 percent worked at home because a hobby became profitable; and the majority were married women over 40. (SK)

Small and home-basedbusinesses have long been identified by Extension educators as an important component of economic development, particularly in rural areas. The services available to these businesses can take many forms, including management training, accessibility of local funding, providing incubation facilities, or setting up mentoring…

This chapter focuses on project-based learning in colleges of business, a concept that offers the student a "hands-on" approach to knowledge by working on actual projects with business community organizations. However, it may take more than such partnerships to assure graduates become "educated people" as well as those…

Based on a review of the literature on ESP and needs analysis, this paper is intended to offer some theoretical supports and inspirations for BE instructors to develop BE curricula for business contexts. It discusses how the theory of need analysis can be used in Business English curriculum design, and proposes some principles of BE curriculum…

OBJECTIVE: To provide family doctors in busy office practices with a model for counseling compatible with patient-centred medicine, including the techniques, strategies, and questions necessary for implementation. QUALITY OF EVIDENCE: The MEDLINE database was searched from 1984 to 1999 using the terms psychotherapy in family practice, brief therapy in family practice, solution-focused therapy, and brief psychotherapy. A total of 170 relevant articles were identified; 75 abstracts were retrieved and a similar number of articles read. Additional resources included seminal books on solution-focused therapy (SFT), bibliographies of salient articles, participation in workshops on SFT, and observation of SFT counseling sessions taped by leaders in the field. MAIN MESSAGE: Solution-focused therapy's concentration on collaborative identification and amplification of patient strengths is the foundation upon which solutions to an array of problems are built. Solution-focused therapy offers simplicity, practicality, and relative ease of application. From the perspective of a new learner, MECSTAT provides a framework that facilitates development of skills. CONCLUSION: Solution-focused therapy recognizes that, even in the bleakest of circumstances, an emphasis on individual strength is empowering. In recognizing patients as experts in self-care, family physicians support and accentuate patient-driven change, and in so doing, are freed from the hopelessness and burnout that can accompany misplaced feelings of responsibility. PMID:11768927

Because No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is not based on educational research or research-based theory, it offers no new innovations nor does anything to improve the fundamental quality of education. NCLB is built on a rigid, outdated factory model in which students step onto a thirteen-year conveyor belt in kindergarten and progress slowly forward,…

SOA-enabled business processes stretch across many cooperating and coordinated systems, possibly crossing organizational boundaries, and technologies like XML and Web services are used for making system-to-system interactions commonplace. Business processes form the foundation for all organizations, and as such, are impacted by industry regulations. This requires organizations to review their business processes and ensure that they meet the compliance standards set forth in legislation. In this paper we sketch a SOA-based service risk management and auditing methodology including a compliance enforcement and verification system that assures verifiable business process compliance. This is done on the basis of a knowledge-based system that allows integration of internal control systems into business processes conform pre-defined compliance rules, monitor both the normal process behavior and those of the control systems during process execution, and log these behaviors to facilitate retrospective auditing.

Business users define calculated facts based on the dimensions and facts contained in a data warehouse. These business calculation definitions contain necessary knowledge regarding quantitative relations for deep analyses and for the production of meaningful reports. The business calculation definitions are implementation and widely organization independent. But no automated procedures facilitating their exchange across organization and implementation boundaries exist. Separately each organization currently has to map its own business calculations to analysis and reporting tools. This paper presents an innovative approach based on standard Semantic Web technologies. This approach facilitates the exchange of business calculation definitions and allows for their automatic linking to specific data warehouses through semantic reasoning. A novel standard proxy server which enables the immediate application of exchanged definitions is introduced. Benefits of the approach are shown in a comprehensive case study.

The purpose of this research is to explore the business strategies of a firm seeking to develop and profitably market a mobile smartphone application to understand how small, digital entrepreneurships may build sustainable businessmodels given substantial market barriers. Through a detailed examination of one firm's process to try to…

Despite their significant presence in western business schools, the needs and experiences of international students have not been adequately reflected in the business education literature. We draw upon psychological contract theory--used to understand employer-employee relationships--to develop a novel theoretical model on the international…

Thirteen Wyoming teachers and counselors interviewed managers in 215 businesses covering 9,515 jobs. This field study served as a basis for developing a field study-data collection model to be used in establishing an education-business liaison network. Each interviewer participating in the study was instructed to contact from 10 to 20 local…

Background Smaller businesses differ from their larger counterparts in having higher rates of occupational injuries and illnesses and fewer resources for preventing those losses. Intervention models developed outside the United States have addressed the resource deficiency issue by incorporating intermediary organizations such as trade associations. Methods This paper extends previous models by using exchange theory and by borrowing from the diffusion of innovations model. It emphasizes that occupational safety and health (OSH) organizations must understand as much about intermediary organizations as they do about small businesses. OSH organizations (“initiators”) must understand how to position interventions and information to intermediaries as added value to their relationships with small businesses. Examples from experiences in two midwestern states are used to illustrate relationships and types of analyses implied by the extended model. Results The study found that intermediary organizations were highly attuned to providing smaller businesses with what they want, including OSH services. The study also found that there are opinion leader organizations and individual champions within intermediaries who are key to decisions and actions about OSH programming. Conclusions The model places more responsibility on both initiators and intermediaries to develop and market interventions that will be valued in the competitive small business environment where the resources required to adopt each new business activity could always be used in other ways. The model is a candidate for empirical validation, and it offers some encouragement that the issue of sustainable OSH assistance to small businesses might be addressed. PMID:24115112

The business in the enterprise is closely related with the information system to such an extent that the business activities are difficult without the information system. The system design technique that considers the business process well, and that enables a quick system development is requested. In addition, the demand for the development cost is also severe than before. To cope with the current situation, the modeling technology named BPM(Business Process Management/Modeling)is drawing attention and becoming important as a key technology. BPM is a technology to modelbusiness activities as business processes and visualize them to improve the business efficiency. However, a general methodology to develop the information system using the analysis result of BPM doesn't exist, and a few development cases are reported. This paper proposes an information system development method combining business process modeling with executable modeling. In this paper we describe a guideline to support consistency of development and development efficiency and the framework enabling to develop the information system from model. We have prototyped the information system with the proposed method and our experience has shown that the methodology is valuable.

This study was conducted to provide NASA-Kennedy Space Center with information and recommendations to support establishing one or more technology-basedbusiness incubators In Florida. The study involved assembling information about incubators: why they succeed, why they fail, how they are organized, and what services they provide. Consequently, this study focuses on widely-recognized "best practices," needed to establish successful technology- basedbusiness incubators. The findings are used to optimize the design and implementation of one or more technology-basedbusiness incubators to be established in Florida. Recommendations reflect both the essential characteristics of successful incubators and the optimal business demographics in Florida. Appendix A provides a fuller description of the objectives of the study. Technology-basedbusiness incubators are an increasing catalyst of new business development across the USi Incubators focus on providing entrepreneurs and small start-up firms with a wide array of support services necessary to bring forth new products and processes based on technologies developed in the nation's federal and private laboratories and universities. Appendix B provides extensive discussion of findings relative to technology- basedbusiness incubators.

Consumer-driven health care is a misnomer. Notwithstanding the enormous role the individual consumer has to play in reshaping the U.S. health care delivery system, this article will focus on the employer as the key driver of change and innovation in the consumerism revolution. American Standard provides a case study of how one major employer has evaluated health care in the context of its business and aggressively integrated consumerism and health into the core of its business. Other companies will appropriately execute consumerism strategies in a fashion consistent with their own needs, culture, resources and populations. However, the principles supporting those strategies will be very much consistent. PMID:16827541

The Association of School Business Officials International compiled the 12 best articles on site-based management from its journal "School Business Affairs." The first section covers budgeting: "School-Site Budgeting," David S. Honeyman and Richard Jensen; "Involving the Principal in the Budget Making Process," Leonard L. Gregory and Roger R.…

In these decades, chronic kidney disease (CKD) has become a global public health problem. Information technology (IT) tools have been used widely to empower the patients with chronic disease (e.g., diabetes and hypertension). It is also a potential application to advance the CKD care. In this project, we analyzed the requirements of a mobile health management system for healthcare workers, patients and their families to design a health management businessmodel for CKD patients. PMID:27332476

Currently there is much debate about the gap between business schools and the business world (Gosling and Mintzberg, 2004; Bennis and O'Toole, 2005). One argument is that business schools focus too much on "scientific" research and lack relevant business context and real-world experience. The proposition in this paper is that the dynamics in the…

Clinical guidelines can improve the quality of care in multiple trauma. In our Department of Trauma Surgery a specific guideline is available paper-based as a set of flowcharts. This format is appropriate for the use by experienced physicians but insufficient for electronic support of learning, workflow and process optimization. A formal and logically consistent version represented with a standardized meta-model is necessary for automatic processing. In our project we transferred the paper-based into an electronic format and analyzed the structure with respect to formal errors. Several errors were detected in seven error categories. The errors were corrected to reach a formally and logically consistent process model. In a second step the clinical content of the guideline was revised interactively using a process-modeling tool. Our study reveals that guideline development should be assisted by process modeling tools, which check the content in comparison to a meta-model. The meta-model itself could support the domain experts in formulating their knowledge systematically. To assure sustainability of guideline development a representation independent of specific applications or specific provider is necessary. Then, clinical guidelines could be used for eLearning, process optimization and workflow management additionally. PMID:12909182

Recent management research has indicated the importance of family, sleep, and recreation as nonwork activities of employees. Drawing from entrainment theory, we develop an expanded model of work-life conflict to contend that macrolevel business cycles influence the amount of time employees spend on both work and nonwork activities. Focusing solely on working adults, we test this model in a large nationally representative dataset from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that spans an 8-year period, which includes the "Great Recession" from 2007 through 2009. We find that during economic booms, employees work more and therefore spend less time with family, sleeping, and recreating. In contrast, in recessionary economies, employees spend less time working and therefore more time with family, sleeping, and recreating. Thus, we extend the theory on time-based work-to-family conflict, showing that there are potential personal and relational benefits for employees in recessionary economies. PMID:26569135

A Salisbury State University (Maryland) program integrating intensive French language and business administration instruction is described. In its pilot, the program had 11 students, all but 1 drawn from French language classes; one was a native speaker. The French portion was taught in the morning by two French professors, and the business…

This document contains standards for the academic content of the Wisconsin K-12 curriculum in the area of business. Developed by task forces of educators, parents, board of education members, and employers and employees, the standards cover content, performance, and proficiency areas. They are cross-referenced to the state standards for English…

This presentation to attendees at Wind Powering America's All-States Summit in Chicago describes businessmodels that were responsible for rapid growth in the solar industry and that may be applicable to the distributed wind industry as well.

The impact and uptake of information and communication technologies that support health care are rather low. Current frameworks for eHealth development suffer from a lack of fitting infrastructures, inability to find funding, complications with scalability, and uncertainties regarding effectiveness and sustainability. These issues can be addressed by defining a better implementation strategy early in the development of eHealth technologies. A businessmodel, and thus businessmodeling, help to determine such an implementation strategy by involving all important stakeholders in a value-driven dialogue on what the technology should accomplish. This idea also seems promising to eHealth, as it can contribute to the whole development of eHealth technology. We therefore suggest that businessmodeling can be used as an effective approach to supporting holistic development of eHealth technologies. The contribution of businessmodeling is elaborated in this paper through a literature review that covers the latest businessmodel research, concepts from the latest eHealth and persuasive technology research, evaluation and insights from our prior eHealth research, as well as the review conducted in the first paper of this series. Businessmodeling focuses on generating a collaborative effort of value cocreation in which all stakeholders reflect on the value needs of the others. The resulting businessmodel acts as the basis for implementation. The development of eHealth technology should focus more on the context by emphasizing what this technology should contribute in practice to the needs of all involved stakeholders. Incorporating the idea of businessmodeling helps to cocreate and formulate a set of critical success factors that will influence the sustainability and effectiveness of eHealth technology. PMID:22204896

The sectoral synchronization observed for the Japanese business cycle in the Indices of Industrial Production data is an example of synchronization. The stability of this synchronization under a shock, e.g., fluctuation of supply or demand, is a matter of interest in physics and economics. We consider an economic system made up of industry sectors and goods markets in order to analyze the sectoral synchronization observed for the Japanese business cycle. A coupled oscillator model that exhibits synchronization is developed based on the Kuramoto model with inertia by adding goods markets, and analytic solutions of the stationary state and the coupling strength are obtained. We simulate the effects on synchronization of a sectoral shock for systems with different price elasticities and the coupling strengths. Synchronization is reproduced as an equilibrium solution in a nearest neighbor graph. Analysis of the order parameters shows that the synchronization is stable for a finite elasticity, whereas the synchronization is broken and the oscillators behave like a giant oscillator with a certain frequency additional to the common frequency for zero elasticity.

appeared to be: timelines, privacy and credibility, availability, pleasantness, and social interaction. Based on the in-depth insights from the actor perspectives, the businessmodel for online precare services is modeled with a visual design. A new care model of the online precare service is designed and compiled of building blocks for the businessmodel. Conclusions For the construction of a care model, actors, transactions, and value attributes are essential elements. The design of a care model structures these elements in a visual way. Guided by the businessmodeling toolkit, the care model design artifact is visualized in the context of an online precare service. Important building blocks include: provision of an online flow of information with regular interactions to the client stimulates self-management of personal health and service-dedicated health expert ensure an increase of the perceived quality of the eHealth service. PMID:25831094

In the past two decades, organizational culture literature has gained tremendous interest for both academic and practitioners. This is based not only on the suggestion that culture is related to performance, but also on the view that it is subject of direct managerial control and manipulation to the desired direction. In the present paper, we adopt Competing Values Framework (CVF) to operationalise organizational culture and Porter's typology to conceptualize business strategy (cost leadership, innovative and marketing differentiation, and focus). Although simulation of social events is a quite difficult task, since there are so many considerations (not all well understood) involved, in the present study we developed a dynamic model to simulate the organizational culture and strategy effects on financial performance. Data obtained from a six-year survey in the banking sector of a European developing economy was used for the proposed dynamic model development.

A microscopic model of aggregation and fragmentation is introduced to investigate the size distribution of businesses. In the model, businesses are constrained to comply with the market price, as expected by the customers, while customers can only buy at the prices offered by the businesses. We show numerically and analytically that the size distribution scales like a power-law. A mean-field version of our model is also introduced and we determine for which value of the parameters the mean-field model agrees with the microscopic model. We discuss to what extent our simple model and its results compare with empirical data on company sizes in the US and debt sizes in Japan. Finally, possible extensions of the mean-field model are discussed, to cope with other empirical data.

Development of college and university degree programs based entirely on workplace learning is increasing and is characterized by responsiveness to employee educational needs, employer demand, restricted government funding for higher education, and institutions' need to appeal to wider markets. These newer approaches cause considerable tension in…

Summarized are presentations made at the University Forum on Competency Based Content in Business, Industry, and Education, planned by the School of Industry and Technology Program Directors of the University of Wisconsin-Stout. The following topics about competency based content are among subjects reported: what competency based content is; who…

The use of PowerPoint (PPT)-based lectures in business classes is prevalent, yet it remains empirically understudied in business education research. The authors investigate whether students in the contemporary business classroom view PPT as a novel stimulus and whether these perceptions of novelty are related to students' self-assessment of…

Consumer markets have been studied in great depth, and many techniques have been used to represent them. These have included regression-basedmodels, logit models, and theoretical market-level models, such as the NBD-Dirichlet approach. Although many important contributions and insights have resulted from studies that relied on these models, there is still a need for a model that could more holistically represent the interdependencies of the decisions made by consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. When the need is for a model that could be used repeatedly over time to support decisions in an industrial setting, it is particularly critical. Although some existing methods can, in principle, represent such complex interdependencies, their capabilities might be outstripped if they had to be used for industrial applications, because of the details this type of modeling requires. However, a complementary method - agent-basedmodeling - shows promise for addressing these issues. Agent-basedmodels use business-driven rules for individuals (e.g., individual consumer rules for buying items, individual retailer rules for stocking items, or individual firm rules for advertizing items) to determine holistic, system-level outcomes (e.g., to determine if brand X's market share is increasing). We applied agent-basedmodeling to develop a multi-scale consumer market model. We then conducted calibration, verification, and validation tests of this model. The model was successfully applied by Procter & Gamble to several challenging business problems. In these situations, it directly influenced managerial decision making and produced substantial cost savings.

RESOURCE21, Inc. is planning to launch a constellation of four satellites to provide frequent and timely information to managers of earth resources for agricultural croplands and forests. Raw satellite data collected twice weekly will be processed into value added information and delivered electronically to customers within hours after satellite acquisition. This information can be used for real time or long range management decisions. Real time management decisions could include herbicide or insecticide applications, additional fertilizer applications, and/or irrigated water management. (Grace 1994) Long range management decisions could include future fertility programs or water management systems. RESOURCE21 is planning a satellite launch in 1998. Considerable work has been conducted in the development of products, potential retail markets, and delivery systems that will generate revenue streams to support this innovative satellite business. This paper will discuss how satellite prototype products were developed and refined over a four year product test program.

Discusses the use of Web-based information systems (WIS) by electronic retailers to attract and retain consumers and deliver business functions and strategy. Presents an abstract model for WIS design in electronic retailing; discusses customers, business determinants, and business interface; and suggests future research. (Author/LRW)

Using a factorial vignette survey and modeling methodology, we developed clinical and information models - incorporating evidence base, key concepts, relevant terms, decision-making and workflow needed to practice safely and effectively - to guide the development of an integrated rule-based knowledge module to support prescribing decisions in asthma. We identified workflows, decision-making factors, factor use, and clinician information requirements. The Unified Modeling Language (UML) and public domain software and knowledge engineering tools (e.g. Protégé) were used, with the Australian GP Data Model as the starting point for expressing information needs. A Web Services service-oriented architecture approach was adopted within which to express functional needs, and clinical processes and workflows were expressed in the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). This formal analysis and modeling methodology to define and capture the process and logic of prescribing best practice in a reference implementation is fundamental to tackling deficiencies in prescribing decision support software. PMID:17023408

We study nonlinear stochastic phenomena in the discrete Kaldor model of business cycles. A numerical parametric analysis of stochastically forced attractors (equilibria, closed invariant curves, discrete cycles) of this model is performed using the stochastic sensitivity functions technique. A spatial arrangement of random states in stochastic attractors is modeled by confidence domains. The phenomenon of noise-induced transitions "chaos-order" is discussed.

Physical concepts developed to describe instabilities in traffic flows can be generalized in a way that allows one to understand the well-known instability of supply chains (the so-called 'bull-whip effect'). That is, small variations in the consumption rate can cause large variations in the production rate of companies generating the requested product. Interestingly, the resulting oscillations have characteristic frequencies which are considerably lower than the variations in the consumption rate. This suggests that instabilities of supply chains may be the reason for the existence of business cycles. At the same time, we establish some links to queueing theory and between micro- and macroeconomics.

To educate the small business entrepreneur on a continuing basis over three years, a model was developed to meet the specific needs of North Dakota business entrepreneurs and the educational institutions serving them. Enrollment in the program at Lake Region Junior College was limited the first year to twenty businesses and was increased the…

Clinical care contributes only 20 percent to overall health outcomes, according to a population health model developed at the University of Wisconsin. Factors contributing to the remainder include lifestyle behaviors, the physical environment, and social and economic forces--all generally considered outside the realm of care. In 2010 Minnesota-based HealthPartners decided to target nonclinical community health factors as a formal part of its strategic business plan to improve public health in the Twin Cities area. The strategy included creating partnerships with businesses and institutions that are generally unaccustomed to working together or considering how their actions could help improve community health. This article describes efforts to promote healthy eating in schools, reduce the stigma of mental illness, improve end-of-life decision making, and strengthen an inner-city neighborhood. Although still in their early stages, the partnerships can serve as encouragement for organizations inside and outside health care that are considering undertaking similar efforts in their markets. PMID:23918490

Kidney transplantation is considered to be the best treatment for people with chronic kidney failure, because it improves the patients' quality of life and increases their length of survival compared with patients undergoing dialysis. The kidney transplantation process in Brazil is defined through laws, decrees, ordinances, and resolutions, but there is no visual representation of this process. The aim of this study was to analyze official documents to construct a representation of the kidney transplantation process in Brazil with the use of business process modeling notation (BPMN). The methodology for this study was based on an exploratory observational study, document analysis, and construction of process diagrams with the use of BPMN. Two rounds of validations by specialists were conducted. The result includes the kidney transplantation process in Brazil representation with the use of BPMN. We analyzed 2 digital documents that resulted in 2 processes with 45 total of activities and events, 6 organizations involved, and 6 different stages of the process. The constructed representation makes it easier to understand the rules for the business of kidney transplantation and can be used by the health care professionals involved in the various activities within this process. Construction of a representation with language appropriate for the Brazilian lay public is underway. PMID:26036495

This study examines undergraduate law-based degree programs in the 404 U.S. universities with undergraduate degrees in business that had Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB) accreditation in 2005. University Web sites were used to identify and compare law-based undergraduate programs inside business to law-related programs…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the enabling role that agent based simulation plays in business and policy. The aforementioned issue has been addressed in this dissertation through three distinct, but related essays. The first essay is a literature review of different research applications of agent based simulation in various…

Describes an Internet-based simulation used in a course about business strategy in an emerging economy. The simulation, when coupled with today's dominant strategy paradigm, the Resource Based View, appears to yield a course design that attracts students while emphasizing the actual substance which is crucial in such a course. (EV)

Web-based homework (WBH) Technology can simplify the creation and grading of assignments as well as provide a feasible platform for assessment testing, but its effect on student learning in business statistics is unknown. This is particularly true of the latest software development of Web-based tutoring agents that dynamically evaluate individual…

This is the first of two articles in which the author shares experiences gained from the development and delivery of a business/industry project-based capstone course. The course integrates research, proposal development and design experience based on knowledge and skills acquired in earlier coursework. The course also incorporates standards and…

This contributed volume is designed for junior college faculty, senior college faculty, and business trainers who wish to integrate new Internet technology for learning. Chapters are as follows: (1) "Preparing for Internet-Based Learning" (Deanie French); (2) "Learning To Learn in a WWW-Based Environment" (Betty Collis and Enrico Meeuwsen); (3)…

Business process management (BPM) principles are commonly used to improve processes within an organisation. But they can equally be applied to supporting the design of an Information System (IS). In a collaborative situation involving several partners, this type of BPM approach may be useful to support the design of a Mediation Information System (MIS), which would ensure interoperability between the partners' ISs (which are assumed to be service oriented). To achieve this objective, the first main task is to build a collaborative business process cartography. The aim of this article is to present a method for bringing together collaborative information and elaborating collaborative business processes from the information gathered (by using a collaborative situation framework, an organisational model, an informational model, a functional model and a metamodel and by using model transformation rules).

New developments in service-oriented computing allow the creation of Web services-enabled business processes that can be defined through the composition of a set of existing services. Recently many proposals have emerged along this line, including BPSS, BPML, and BPEL4WS, with little effort spent on the development of systematic methods to effectively support composition of partner business processes that dynamically discover and interact with publicly available business processes at runtime. Motivated by this, this paper proposes a framework for automatically synthesizing the partner business processes, named Co-BP, from the formal description of a target business process, and discusses preliminary work on implementing the proposed ideas by use of XSLT. The proposed framework bases its foundation on the well-known Petri net techniques such as reachability analysis and theory of regions. It is expected that the work presented in this paper can promote the rapid adoption of Web services composition languages by providing an automated tool for facilitating seamless integration of distributed business processes.

This paper considers the effectiveness of service business approach for reducing CO2 emission. “HDRIVE” is a service business using inverters to reduce energy consumption of motor drive. The businessmodel of this service is changed for finding new opportunities of CO2 emission reduction by combining various factors such as financial service or long-term service contract. Risk analysis of this businessmodel is very important for giving stable services to users for long term. HDRIVE businessmodel is found to be suitable for this objective. This service can be applied to the industries such as chemical or steel industry effectively, where CO2 emission is very large, and has the possibility of creating new business considering CDM or trading CO2 emission right. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated through several examples in real business.

This article aims to share a business process modeling experience in a re-engineering project of a medical records department in a 2,965-bed hospital. It presents the modeling strategy, an extract of the results and the feedback experience. PMID:23920743

The Oregon Business Council (OBC)-David Douglas Model District Project was undertaken for two reasons: (1) to create a model for a district's accelerated implementation of all the elements of school reform as mandated in Oregon House Bill 3565; and (2) to learn lessons about school reform that would inform OBC member companies and school districts…

Although management scholars have provided a variety of metaphors to describe the role of students in management courses, researchers have yet to explore students' identification with the models and how they are linked to educational outcomes. This article develops a measurement tool for students' identification with business education models and…

The model described here was developed for use as a program planning guide by teachers, many of them business and other lay people, at the secondary school level who offer adult education courses on how to make management decisions and solve problems. Ten features of the model are listed: (1) The purpose is to assist owner-operators or managers to…

Purpose: This article proposes the development of a conceptual model to help understand the nature of management learning in the micro business context and to inform research and policy discourse. Design/Methodology/Approach: The model is developed on the basis of a literature search and review of academic and grey literature. Findings: The…

Although there is widespread agreement on the importance of ethics instruction in business education, there is not agreement on the best approach or timing of instruction. This article uses J. O. Prochaska and DiClemente's transtheoretical model of change as the basis for a developmental model of student readiness for learning about ethics. By…

Military bases across the country are being shut down as part of a domestic military consolidation that began five years ago. The ramifications of these base closures for the environmental industry are significant. Specifically, the closure of military bases across the country could signal the opening of new, and lucrative, opportunities for the waste management industry. These opportunities fall into two broad categories: first--the site remediation of bases slated for closure; and second--the potential use of former military sites for waste management facilities. In most cases, regulations require that, prior to the sale of federal land to local governments or private companies, hazardous wastes must be cleaned up. The result An economic boon for companies serving in the remediation process. In many cases, there are readily available, and proven, solutions of treatment, remediation, and restoration for these sites.

This guidebook and teacher's guide accompany a personal computer software program and introduce the key elements of financial projection modeling to project the financial statements of an industrial enterprise. The student will then build a model on an electronic spreadsheet. The guidebook teaches the purpose of a financial model and the steps…

We advocate for problem-based learning (PBL) as a rhetorical pedagogy for business communication. Briefly put, classic PBL inverts the typical instructional sequence; rather than presenting concepts first and then asking students to apply them, PBL creates situations in which students must learn the concepts in order to solve a "problem"…

This guide is designed to provide assistance to business and industry when they engage in work-based learning programs, especially those targeted toward high school students. It is intended as a source of information regarding the basic provisions of child labor, safety and health, and liability. The guide identifies potential problems and…

This article investigates lexical gender in specialized communication. The key method of analysis is that of forms of address, professional titles, and "generic man" in a 10 million word corpus of written Business English. After a brief introduction and literature review on both gender in specialized communication and similar corpus-based views of…

This study aimed to explore the attitude and learning effectiveness in game based simulations from college students' perspective. The participants included 189 business college students in Taiwan. The main instrument employed in this study was McDonald's video game. Additionally, participant selection, data collection and analysis, and results…

The present study attempted to investigate the effect of using blog-based peer feedback on the persuasive writing of EFL business management students at the community college in Bisha, King Khalid University, Saudi Arabia. The study used a pre-test/post-test experimental and control group design. An experimental group and a control group were…

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to provide a thorough analysis of the concepts of business intelligence (BI), knowledge management (KM) and analytical CRM (aCRM) and to establish a framework for integrating all the three to each other. The paper also seeks to establish a KM and aCRM based framework using data mining (DM) techniques, which…

This paper advances the argument favoring criterion-referenced/modular-based instruction (CRMBI) as applied to training and educational efforts in business, industrial, and military settings. CRMBI is defined as an instructional delivery system (along with the concomitant curriculum design and instructional materials development implications) that…

A mapping of Core Components specification based e-business standards to an ontology is presented. The Web Ontology Language (OWL) is used for ontology development. In order to preserve the existing hierarchy of the standards, an emphasis is put on the mapping of Core Components elements to specific constructs in OWL. The main purpose of developing an e-business standards' ontology is to create a foundation for an automated mapping system that would be able to convert concepts from various standards in an independent fashion. The practical applicability and verification of the presented mappings is tested on the mapping of Universal Business Language version 2.0 and Cross Industry Invoice version 2.0 to OWL.

Much research effort has been spent on the provision of analysis methods for business processes specified by means of Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL). Nevertheless, most approaches neglect conditional control flow, though running the risk of erroneous analysis results. In this paper, we present a restructuring approach for WS-BPEL processes, which helps to partly remedy conditional control flow. We therefore use a combination of workflow graphs and Concurrent Static Single Assignment Form. Based on the hybrid format, we are able to identify loops with static quasi-constant loop condition and transform them in such a way, that conditional control flow is replaced by unconditional control flow. Augmenting an existing analysis with the proposed restructuring then enables more precise results, as is shown for a compatibility analysis of WS-BPEL business processes.

Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) provide access to geospatial data and operations through interoperable Web services. These data and operations can be chained to set up specialized geospatial business processes, and these processes can give support to different applications. End users can benefit from these applications, while experts can integrate the Web services in their own business processes and developments. This paper presents an SDI-based territorial analysis Web information system for Spain, which gives access to land cover, topography and elevation data, as well as to a number of interoperable geospatial operations by means of a Web Processing Service (WPS). Several examples illustrate how different territorial analysis business processes are supported. The system has been established by the Spanish National SDI (Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de España, IDEE) both as an experimental platform for geoscientists and geoinformation system developers, and as a mechanism to contribute to the Spanish citizens knowledge about their territory.

Getting libraries involved in industry-university-government collaboration : Libraries should support inauguration of business and lead SME into a knowledge-based society : What Toshiaki Takeuchi does as Business Library Association's President

Problem-based learning (PBL) is an instructional approach that provides learners with opportunities to identify solutions to ill-structured, real-world problems. Previous research provides evidence to support claims about the positive effects of PBL on cognitive skill development and knowledge retention. This study contributes to existing…

This paper describes a long term project using bespoke video case studies designed and produced as the basis (variously) for formative in-class and on-line forum activity and assessment of group coursework and via case based exam. The research sought to observe student engagement behaviours when faced with innovative teaching methods using:…

A structured search reveals that online marketing of stem-cell-based interventions is skewed toward developed economies including the United States, Ireland, Australia, and Germany. Websites made broad, imprecise therapeutic claims and frequently failed to detail procedures. Widespread marketing poses challenges to regulators, bioethicists, and those seeking realistic hope from therapies. PMID:27494673

For a long time on-the-job training has been considered as the single point of contact of technical education with the real world job market. Indeed, traditional on-the-job training activities are of great educational value and complement uniquely any classroom-based learning activity. However, it has been observed that several obstacles arise…

The objective of this research is to understand how a set of systems, as defined by the business process, creates value. The three studies contained in this work develop the model of process-based automation. The model states that complementarities among systems are specified by handoffs in the business process. The model also provides theory to…

Although a growing body of work addresses the current role of neoliberalism in displacing democratic equality as a goal of public education, attempts to parse such impacts rarely draw from historical accounts. At least one tenet of neoliberalism--the application of businessmodels to public institutions--was also pervasive at the turn of the 20th…

The Human Systems Engineering (HSE) Model was created to facilitate collaboration among education, business, and industry. It emphasized the role of leaders who converge with others to accomplish their goals while paying attention to the key elements that create successful partnerships. The partnership of XXsys Technologies, Inc., University of…

Following the analytical approach suggested in Campbell, the authors consider a baseline real-business-cycle (RBC) model with endogenous labor supply. They observe that the coefficients in the loglinear approximation of the dynamic equations characterizing the equilibrium are related to the fundamental parameters in a relatively simple manner.…

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study was to explore factors for selecting a businessmodel for scaling online enrollment by institutions of higher education. The goal was to explore the lived experiences of academic industry experts involved in the selection process. The research question for this study was: What were the lived…

This preface presents the purpose, content and results of one of the ICCMSE 2008 symposiums organized by Prof. Ioannis Seimenis and Dr. Damianos P. Sakas. The present symposium aims at investigating Business and Management disciplines, as well as the prospect of strategic decision analysis by means of dynamic simulation models.

Higher education is under enormous pressure to improve outcomes and reduce costs. Information technology can help achieve these goals, but only if it is properly harnessed. This article argues that one key to harnessing information technology is businessmodel innovation that results in more "open" and "unbundled" operations in learning and…

The purpose of this dissertation was to develop a dynamic model and survey instruments to study the presence, strength, and susceptibility to change of the factors that influence the "choice of major" decision in an undergraduate population of business school students, and to determine if the factors are the same for male and female…

EU counties have a historically unique opportunity to enable their creative industries to promote the knowledge societies, applying new businessmodels to their media content and networks markets, that are digital dividend (DD) aware. This new extra-media gatekeeping factor could shape new alliances and co operations among the member states and the global media markets, as well.

The design of enterprise information systems requires students to master technical skills for elicitation, modeling, and reengineering business processes as well as soft skills for information gathering and communication. These tacit skills and behaviors cannot be effectively taught students but rather experienced and learned by students. This…

We investigate the problem of ranking all process models in a repository according to their similarity with respect to a given process model. We focus specifically on the application of graph matching algorithms to this similarity search problem. Since the corresponding graph matching problem is NP-complete, we seek to find a compromise between computational complexity and quality of the computed ranking. Using a repository of 100 process models, we evaluate four graph matching algorithms, ranging from a greedy one to a relatively exhaustive one. The results show that the mean average precision obtained by a fast greedy algorithm is close to that obtained with the most exhaustive algorithm.

Because population health improvement requires action on multiple determinants--including medical care, health behaviors, and the social and physical environments--no single entity can be held accountable for achieving improved outcomes. Medical organizations, government, schools, businesses, and community organizations all need to make substantial changes in how they approach health and how they allocate resources. To this end, we suggest the development of multisectoral community health business partnership models. Such collaborative efforts are needed by sectors and actors not accustomed to working together. Healthcare executives can play important leadership roles in fostering or supporting such partnerships in local and national arenas where they have influence. In this article, we develop the following components of this argument: defining a community health businessmodel; defining population health and the Triple Aim concept; reaching beyond core mission to help create the model; discussing the shift for care delivery beyond healthcare organizations to other community sectors; examining who should lead in developing the community businessmodel; discussing where the resources for a community businessmodel might come from; identifying that better evidence is needed to inform where to make cost-effective investments; and proposing some next steps. The approach we have outlined is a departure from much current policy and management practice. But new models are needed as a road map to drive action--not just thinking--to address the enormous challenge of improving population health. While we applaud continuing calls to improve health and reduce disparities, progress will require more robust incentives, strategies, and action than have been in practice to date. Our hope is that ideas presented here will help to catalyze a collective, multisectoral response to this critical social and economic challenge. PMID:25671991

Biobank-suisse (BBS) is a collaborative network of biobanks in Switzerland. Since 2005, the network has worked with biobank managers towards a Swiss biobanking platform that harmonizes structures and procedures. The work with biobank managers has shown that long-term, sustainable financing is difficult to obtain. In this report, three typical biobank businessmodels are identified and their characteristics analyzed. Five forces analysis was used to understand the competitive environment of biobanks. Data provided by OECD was used for financial estimations. The model was constructed using the businessmodel canvas tool. The businessmodels identified feature financing influenced by the economic situation and the research budgets in a given country. Overall, the competitive environment for biobanks is positive. The bargaining power with the buyer is negative since price setting and demand prediction is difficult. In Switzerland, the healthcare industry collects approximately 5600 U.S. dollars per person and year. If each Swiss citizen paid 0.1% (or 5 U.S. dollars) of this amount to Swiss biobanks, 45 million U.S. dollars could be collected. This compares to the approximately 10 million U.S. dollars made available for cohort studies, longitudinal studies, and pathology biobanks through science funding. With the same approach, Germany, the United States, Canada, France, and the United Kingdom could collect 361, 2634, 154, 264, and 221 million U.S. dollars, respectively. In Switzerland and in other countries, an annual fee less than 5 U.S. dollars per person is sufficient to provide biobanks with sustainable financing. This inspired us to construct a businessmodel that not only includes the academic and industrial research sectors as customer segment, but also includes the population. The revenues would be collected as fees by the healthcare system. In Italy and Germany, a small share of healthcare spending is already used to finance selected clinical trials. The legal

Wellness is a term often used to talk about optimal health as "dynamic balance of physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and intellectual health." While healthcare is a term about care offered to patients for improving their health. We use both terms, as well as the BusinessModel Canvas (BMC) methodology, to design a digital ecosystem model for healthcare and wellness called DE4HW; the model considers economic, technological, and legal asymmetries, which are present on e-services beyond geographical regions. BMC methodology was embedded into the global project strategy called: IBOT (Initiate, Build, Operate and Transfer); it is a methodology to establish a functional, integrated national telemedicine network and virtual education network; of which we took its phases rationale. The results in this work illustrate the design of DE4HW model, into the first phase of IBOT, enriched with the BMC, which enables us to define actors, their interactions, rules and protocols, in order to build DE4HW, while IBOT strategy manages the project goal, up to the transfer phase, where an integral service platform of healthcare and wellness is turned over to stakeholders. PMID:27118010

This article examines the factors that affect the decision making of the training managers responsible in case of business communication field as they have emerged from the study of the decision that have taken place in the commercial sector in this specific Greek market. Previous researches have indicated the participation of a number of variables in this kind of decision. The aim of this article is to locate the main factors which determine, in the commercial sector the decision for the training of the employees in the field of business communication. On the basis of quality research, dynamic simulation model have been created for some of this main factors.

A method was developed of obtaining propulsive base flow data in both hot and cold jet environments, at Mach numbers and altitude of relevance to NASA launcher designs. The base flow data was used to perform computational fluid dynamics (CFD) turbulence model assessments of base flow predictive capabilities in order to provide increased confidence in base thermal and pressure load predictions obtained from computational modeling efforts. Predictive CFD analyses were used in the design of the experiments, available propulsive models were used to reduce program costs and increase success, and a wind tunnel facility was used. The data obtained allowed assessment of CFD/turbulence models in a complex flow environment, working within a building-block procedure to validation, where cold, non-reacting test data was first used for validation, followed by more complex reacting base flow validation.

Reviews the key factors influencing small business management education in the United Kingdom, particularly government policies encouraging small business development. Postulates a modelbased on the career cycle and considers training opportunities for various stages. (SK)

This study investigates students' perceptions of computer-based learning environments, their attitude towards business statistics, and their academic achievement in higher education. Guided by learning environments concepts and attitudinal theory, a theoretical model was proposed with two instruments, one for measuring the learning environment and…

The teacher-scholar model was proposed in Boyer (1990) and defines four dimensions of scholarship: 1) discovery, 2) integration, 3) application, and 4) teaching. In this paper, we describe the characteristics of scholarship, the theory of the scholarship of teaching, the excellent teacher, and undergraduate research and scholarship. We then show…

AACSB accreditation, a student-centered mission statement, and the continuous quality improvement that most educators engage in have resulted in an increase in student research projects. This presented an opportunity to develop a venue for students to showcase their research. The paper describes a model for a student research conference in…

We examined the adequacy of existing shielding guidelines using five-year clinical data from a busy CyberKnife center. From June 2006 through July 2011, 1,370 patients were treated with a total of 4,900 fractions and 680,691 radiation beams using a G4 CyberKnife. Prescription dose and total monitor units (MU) were analyzed to estimate the shielding workload and modulation factor. In addition, based on the beam's radiation source position, targeting position, MU, and beam collimator size, the MATLAB program was used to project each beam toward the shielding barrier. The summation of the projections evaluates the distribution of the shielding load. On average, each patient received 3.6 fractions, with an average 9.1 Gy per fraction prescribed at the 71.1% isodose line, using 133.7 beams and 6,200 MU. Intracranial patients received an average of 2.7 fractions, with 8.6 Gy per fraction prescribed at the 71.4% isodose line, using 133 beams and 5,083 MU. Extracranial patients received an average of 3.94 fractions, with 9.2 Gy per frac- tion prescribed at the 71% isodose line, using 134 beams and 6,514 MU. Most- used collimator sizes for intracranial patients were smaller (7.5 to 20 mm) than for extracranial patients (20 to 40 mm). Eighty-five percent of the beams exited through the floor, and about 40% of the surrounding wall area received no direct beam. For the rest of the wall, we found "hot" areas that received above-average MU. The locations of these areas were correlated with the projection of the nodes for extracranial treatments. In comparison, the beam projections on the wall were more spread for intracranial treatments. The maximum MU any area received from intracranial treatment was less than 0.25% of total MU used for intracranial treatments, and was less than 1.2% of total MU used for extracranial treatments. The combination of workload, modulation factor, and use factor in our practice are about tenfold less than recommendations in the existing Cyber

This article describes how a system of care operated by a county government agency used a fiscal crisis as the opportunity to reform its children's system. A cross-system response to the crisis is outlined that includes a system of care framework coupled with a businessmodel, inter-departmental collaboration and leadership, the use of strategic reinvestment strategies, and a quality improvement system that focuses on key indicators. Implementation of the system change is described with a specific focus on cross-system entry points, financing strategies that re-allocate funds from deep-end programs to community-based services, and management oversight through the use of performance indicators to monitor and support effectiveness. This article examines the results of the system change, including the diversion of youth from system penetration, the reduction in residential treatment bed days, the re-allocation of these savings to community-based services, and the outcomes of children who were diverted from residential care and served in the community. The article offers a number of recommendations for other communities contemplating system change. PMID:22543718

The enabling power of technology, especially information technology and social software, prompts a radical shift in economic and social interactions in societies around the globe. Existing traditional school based, formalized learning formats are unable to accommodate specific new learning needs. Hence, customized to the respective purposes of…

An energy and environmental crisis will emerge throughout the world if we continue with our current practices of generation and distribution of electricity. A possible solution to this problem is based on the Smart grid concept, which is heavily influenced by Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Although the electricity industry is mostly regulated, there are global models used as roadmaps for Smart Grids' implementation focusing on technologies and the basic generation-distribution-transmission model. This project aims to further enhance a businessmodel for a future global deployment. It takes into consideration the many factors interacting in this energy provision process, based on the diffusion of technologies and literature surveys on the available documents in the Internet as well as peer-reviewed publications. Tariffs and regulations, distributed energy generation, integration of service providers, consumers becoming producers, self-healing devices, and many other elements are shifting this industry into a major change towards liberalization and deregulation of this sector, which has been heavily protected by the government due to the importance of electricity for consumers. We propose an Energy Management BusinessModel composed by four basic elements: Supply Chain, Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Stakeholders Response, and the resulting Green Efficient Energy (GEE). We support the developed modelbased on the literature survey, we support it with the diffusion analysis of these elements, and support the overall model with two surveys: one for peers and professionals, and other for experts in the field, based on the Smart Grid Carnegie Melon Maturity Model (CMU SEI SGMM). The contribution of this model is a simple path to follow for entities that want to achieve environmental friendly energy with the involvement of technology and all stakeholders.

Stratified medicine offers both opportunities and challenges to the conventional businessmodels that drive pharmaceutical R&D. Given the increasingly unsustainable blockbuster model of drug development, due in part to maturing product pipelines, alongside increasing demands from regulators, healthcare providers and patients for higher standards of safety, efficacy and cost-effectiveness of new therapies, stratified medicine promises a range of benefits to pharmaceutical and diagnostic firms as well as healthcare providers and patients. However, the transition from 'blockbusters' to what might now be termed 'niche-busters' will require the adoption of new, innovative businessmodels, the identification of different and perhaps novel types of value along the R&D pathway, and a smarter approach to regulation to facilitate innovation in this area. In this paper we apply the Innogen Centre's interdisciplinary ALSIS methodology, which we have developed for the analysis of life science innovation systems in contexts where the value creation process is lengthy, expensive and highly uncertain, to this emerging field of stratified medicine. In doing so, we consider the complex collaboration, timing, coordination and regulatory interactions that shape businessmodels, value chains and value systems relevant to stratified medicine. More specifically, we explore in some depth two convergence models for co-development of a therapy and diagnostic before market authorisation, highlighting the regulatory requirements and policy initiatives within the broader value system environment that have a key role in determining the probable success and sustainability of these models. PMID:22440585

It is a tremendous honor for my group and me to receive the recognition of the 2014 Women in Cell Biology Junior Award. I would like to take the opportunity of this essay to describe my scientific journey, discuss my philosophy about running a group, and propose what I think is a generalizable model to efficiently establish an academic laboratory. This essay is about my view on the critical components that go into establishing a highly functional academic laboratory during the current tough, competitive times. PMID:25360043

This paper examines the accounting and stock price performance of two Canadian airlines, WestJet and Air Canada, over a five year period, taking into account the aftermath of the systemic shock to the airline industry produced by the September 11, 2001 (9-11), terrorist attacks and subsequent events such as the 2002 SARS outbreak, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the accompanying rise in jet fuel prices. Our study focuses on the viability of low-cost versus conventional-cost businessmodels in Canada under the current business environment and the ability of airlines to withstand and effectively respond to catastrophic industry events. Furthermore, we link the effectiveness of the airlines responses to these events to specific elements of their respective businessmodels. We test our hypothesis through a case study. We focus on WestJet as a typical low-cost airline and compare its accounting and stock performance to Air Canada, a legacy carrier and rival in several business sectors. We find WestJet to be much less affected by catastrophic industry events. By decomposing each airline s return volatility, we observe that WestJet s systematic and unsystematic risk increased only slightly during the industry's post-9-11 turmoil when compared to Air Canada. In addition, we find that both WestJet s accounting and stock performance have been highly superior to those of Air Canada. We argue that WestJet s businessmodel provides the firm with significantly more financial and operational flexibility than its legacy rival, Air Canada. WestJet's lower operating costs, high consumer trust, product offering, corporate structure, workforce and work practices, as well as operational procedures are all factors that appear to contribute to its relative success.

This paper seeks to confirm whether students using the Global Market Potential System Online (GMPSO) web based software, (http://globalmarketpotential.com), for their class project enhanced their knowledge and understanding of international business. The challenge most business instructors and practitioners face is to determine how to bring the…

This paper considers dual-channel game model with bounded rationality, using the theory of bifurcations of dynamical system. The business objectives of retailers are assumed to be different, which is closer to reality than previous studies. We study the local stable region of Nash equilibrium point and find that business objectives can expand the stable region and play an important role in price strategy. One interesting finding is that a fiercer competition tends to stabilize the Nash equilibrium. Simulation shows the complex behavior of two dimensional dynamic system, we find period doubling bifurcation and chaos phenomenon. We measure performances of the model in different period by using the index of average profit. The results show that unstable behavior in economic system is often an unfavorable outcome. So this paper discusses the application of adaptive adjustment mechanism when the model exhibits chaotic behavior and then allows the retailers to eliminate the negative effects.

Business processes represent the operational capabilities of an organization. In order to ensure process continuity, the effective management of risks becomes an area of key concern. In this paper we propose an approach for supporting risk identification with the use of higher-level organizational models. We provide some intuitive metrics for extracting measures of actor criticality and vulnerability from organizational models. This helps direct risk management to areas of critical importance within organization models. Additionally, the information can be used to assess alternative organizational structures in domains where risk mitigation is crucial. At the process level, these measures can be used to help direct improvements to the robustness and failsafe capabilities of critical or vulnerable processes. We believe our novel approach, will provide added benefits when used with other approaches to risk management during business process management, that do not reference the greater organizational context during risk assessment.

In recent years, information security management has matured into a professional discipline that covers both technical and managerial aspects in an organisational environment. Information security is increasingly dependent on business-driven parameters and interfaces to a variety of organisational units and departments. In contrast, common security models and frameworks have remained largely technical. A review of extant models ranging from [LaBe73] to more recent models shows that technical aspects are covered in great detail, while the managerial aspects of security are often neglected.Likewise, the business view on organisational security is frequently at odds with the demands of information security personnel or information technology management. In practice, senior and executive level management remain comparatively distant from technical requirements. As a result, information security is generally regarded as a cost factor rather than a benefit to the organisation.

Teacher competence is crucial for quality of teaching and learner achievement. Competency models and competence measurement are prevalent in domains such as the natural sciences and lacking in others. We conducted our research in the field of business and economics education by focusing on the accounting domain because it is key to a deep…

There is a global shift in the teaching methodology of science and engineering toward multidisciplinary, team-based processes. To meet the demands of an evolving technical industry and lead the way in engineering education, innovative curricula are essential. This paper describes the development of multidisciplinary, team-based learning environments in undergraduate and graduate engineering curricula focused on medical device design. In these programs, students actively collaborate with clinicians, professional engineers, business professionals, and their peers to develop innovative solutions to real-world problems. In the undergraduate senior capstone courses, teams of biomedical engineering (BME) and business students have produced and delivered numerous functional prototypes to satisfied clients. Pursuit of commercialization of devices has led to intellectual property (IP) disclosures and patents. Assessments have indicated high levels of success in attainment of student learning outcomes and student satisfaction with their undergraduate design experience. To advance these projects toward commercialization and further promote innovative team-based learning, a Master of Engineering (MEng) in Design and Commercialization was recently launched. The MEng facilitates teams of graduate students in engineering, life sciences, and business who engage in innovation-commercialization (IC) projects and coursework that take innovative ideas through research and development (R&D) to create marketable devices. The activities are structured with students working together as a "virtual company," with targeted outcomes of commercialization (license agreements and new start-ups), competitive job placement, and/or career advancement. PMID:26902869

We present a microanalytical firm mobility model for the City of Hamilton, Canada, developed with data from the Statistics Canada Business Register. Contributing to the scarce literature on firm migration behavior, we explore and model the determinants of mobility among small and medium size firms who retained less than 200 employees between 1996 and 1997. Our exploratory results suggest that short distance moves are more common and tend to occur among smaller firms. Econometric modeling results support these assertions and indicate that the willingness to move can be explained by a firm’s internal characteristics (e.g. age, size, growth and industry type) as well as location factors related to the urban environment where the firm is located. The modeling results will serve as input for the development of an agent-based firmographic decision support system that can be used to inform the planning process in the study area.

The goal of this thesis to develop a real estate investment model that creates a financial incentive for property owners to perform energy efficiency retrofits in small multifamily rental housing in southern New England. The medium for this argument is a business plan that is backed by a review of the literature and input from industry experts. In addition to industry expertise, the research covers four main areas: the context of green building, efficient building technologies, precedent programs, and the Providence, RI real estate market for the business plan. The thesis concludes that the model proposed can improve the profitability of real estate investment in small multifamily rental properties, though the extent to which this is possible depends partially on utility-run incentive programs and the capital available to invest in retrofit measures.

The goal of a separation can be defined in terms of business needs. One goal often used is to provide the required separation in minimum time, but many other goals are also possible. These include maximizing resolution within an analysis-time limit, or minimizing the overall cost. The remaining requirements of the separation can be applied as constraints in the optimization of the goal. We will present a flexible, business-objective-based approach for optimizing the operational parameters of high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) methods. After selecting the stationary phase and the mobile-phase components, several isocratic experiments are required to build a retention model. Multivariate optimization is performed, within the model, to find the best combination of the parameters being varied so that the result satisfies the goal to the fullest extent possible within the constraints. Interdependencies of parameters can be revealed by plotting the loci of optimal variable values or the function being optimized against a constraint. We demonstrate the concepts with a model separation originally requiring a 54 min analysis time. Multivariate optimization reduces the predicted analysis time to as short as 8 min, depending on the goals and constraints specified. PMID:14601838

This paper describes a new businessmodel for advancing NASA human health and performance innovations and demonstrates how open innovation shaped its development. A 45 percent research and technology development budget reduction drove formulation of a strategic plan grounded in collaboration. We describe the strategy execution, including adoption and results of open innovation initiatives, the challenges of cultural change, and the development of virtual centers and a knowledge management tool to educate and engage the workforce and promote cultural change.

It seems that what has been said by now about market and competitiveness does not fit perfectly with competences of getting the best of profit. Sometimes, the classical methods of fundamentals of management do not apply to individual companies that face irregular accommodation on the market. It is high time to replace the perfect business with the right one. New approaches and models may help in identifying new competition trends, changes for better application of purposes and proposals.

Types of solutions of the Goodwin business cycle model with the fixed investment time lag have been numerically studied. It is shown that the long-periodic Goodwin's oscillations are excited by the independent investment A in case A exceeds a threshold. If A falls below the threshold, then there are only sawtooth oscillations with a period equal to the investment time lag. Near the threshold, the time behavior of the income is irregular.

The feasibility of using modelbased control (MBC) for robotic manipulators was investigated. A double inverted pendulum system was constructed as the experimental system for a general study of dynamically stable manipulation. The original interest in dynamically stable systems was driven by the objective of high vertical reach (balancing), and the planning of inertially favorable trajectories for force and payload demands. The model-based control approach is described and the results of experimental tests are summarized. Results directly demonstrate that MBC can provide stable control at all speeds of operation and support operations requiring dynamic stability such as balancing. The application of MBC to systems with flexible links is also discussed.

The authors investigated business faculty members' degree of Power-Point (PPT) use across different functional areas in a business program and their use of specific PPT features. The authors also examined students' perceptions of PPT's effectiveness across different business courses (e.g., accounting, economics, management, business law,…

Business plans are advocated by many business support professionals and others, such as educators in higher education institutions, because they suit their purposes. A typical view is that a business plan is "one of the most important steps in setting up any new business" (Burns, 2011); but their hegemony is now being questioned. Sarasvathy (2008)…

A flight test of a business jet aircraft with various ice accretions was performed to obtain data to validate flight simulation models developed through wind tunnel tests. Three types of ice accretions were tested: pre-activation roughness, runback shapes that form downstream of the thermal wing ice protection system, and a wing ice protection system failure shape. The high fidelity flight simulation models of this business jet aircraft were validated using a software tool called "Overdrive." Through comparisons of flight-extracted aerodynamic forces and moments to simulation-predicted forces and moments, the simulation models were successfully validated. Only minor adjustments in the simulation database were required to obtain adequate match, signifying the process used to develop the simulation models was successful. The simulation models were implemented in the NASA Ice Contamination Effects Flight Training Device (ICEFTD) to enable company pilots to evaluate flight characteristics of the simulation models. By and large, the pilots confirmed good similarities in the flight characteristics when compared to the real airplane. However, pilots noted pitch up tendencies at stall with the flaps extended that were not representative of the airplane and identified some differences in pilot forces. The elevator hinge moment model and implementation of the control forces on the ICEFTD were identified as a driver in the pitch ups and control force issues, and will be an area for future work.

The report documents the experiments with object oriented modelling of Universal Personal Telecommunication (UPT) in a telecommunication environment based on the basic principles of open distributed processing (ODP). Through the object-oriented analysis and design technique Object Modelling Technique (OMT) the service is modelled as a collection of software objects distributed across multiple network nodes. A software platform provides the mechanisms for application objects to interact. The platform builds on the basic facilities in the native computing and communication environments, but hides the heterogeneity of these environments and provides distribution transparency at the application programmer's interface. The report closes with some thoughts about applying the paradigm of ODP to intelligent networks (IN), and the experience with OMT as a modelling technique for real time distributed applications.

Business incubators can play a major role in helping to turn a business idea into a technology-based organization that is economically efficient. However, there is a shortage in the literature regarding the efficiency evaluation and productivity evolution of the new technology-based firms (NTBFs) in the incubation scope. This study develops a modelbased on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology, which allows the incubated NTBFs to evaluate and improve the efficiency of their management. Moreover, the Malmquist index is used to examine productivity change. The index is decomposed into multiple components to give insights into the root sources of productivity change. The proposed model was applied in a case study with 13 NTBFs incubated. From that study, we conclude that inefficient firms invest excessively in research and development (R&D), and, on average, firms have a productivity growth in the period of study. PMID:25874266

Business incubators can play a major role in helping to turn a business idea into a technology-based organization that is economically efficient. However, there is a shortage in the literature regarding the efficiency evaluation and productivity evolution of the new technology-based firms (NTBFs) in the incubation scope. This study develops a modelbased on the data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology, which allows the incubated NTBFs to evaluate and improve the efficiency of their management. Moreover, the Malmquist index is used to examine productivity change. The index is decomposed into multiple components to give insights into the root sources of productivity change. The proposed model was applied in a case study with 13 NTBFs incubated. From that study, we conclude that inefficient firms invest excessively in research and development (R&D), and, on average, firms have a productivity growth in the period of study. PMID:25874266

We describe the business-oriented architectural principles of the EC FP7 project “BREIN” for service-based computing. The architecture is founded on principles of how real businesses interact to mutual benefit, and we show how these can be applied to SOA and Grid computing. We present building blocks that can be composed in many ways to produce different value systems and supply chains for the provision of computing services over the Internet. We also introduce the complementary BREIN VO concept, which is centric to, and managed by, a main contractor who bears the responsibility for the whole VO. The BREIN VO has an execution lifecycle for the creation and operation of the VO, and we have related this to an application-focused workflow involving steps that provide real end-user value. We show how this can be applied to an engineering simulation application and how the workflow can be adapted should the need arise.

Engineers, who design systems using text specification documents, focus their work upon the completed system to meet Performance, time and budget goals. Consistency and integrity is difficult to maintain within text documents for a single complex system and more difficult to maintain as several systems are combined into higher-level systems, are maintained over decades, and evolve technically and in performance through updates. This system design approach frequently results in major changes during the system integration and test phase, and in time and budget overruns. Engineers who build system specification documents within a model-based systems environment go a step further and aggregate all of the data. They interrelate all of the data to insure consistency and integrity. After the model is constructed, the various system specification documents are prepared, all from the same database. The consistency and integrity of the model is assured, therefore the consistency and integrity of the various specification documents is insured. This article attempts to define model-based systems relative to such an environment. The intent is to expose the complexity of the enabling problem by outlining what is needed, why it is needed and how needs are being addressed by international standards writing teams.

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are generally regarded as the gold standard for evaluating health care interventions. The level of uncertainty around a trial's estimate of effect is, however, frequently linked to how successful the trial has been in recruiting and retaining participants. As recruitment is often slower or more difficult than expected, with many trials failing to reach their target sample size within the timescale and funding originally envisaged, the results are often less reliable than they could have been. The high number of trials that require an extension to the recruitment period in order to reach the required sample size potentially delays the introduction of more effective therapies into routine clinical practice. Moreover, it may result in less research being undertaken as resources are redirected to extending existing trials rather than funding additional studies. Poor recruitment to publicly-funded RCTs has been much debated but there remains remarkably little clear evidence as to why many trials fail to recruit well, which recruitment methods work, in which populations and settings and for what type of intervention. One proposed solution to improving recruitment and retention is to adopt methodology from the business world to inform and structure trial management techniques. We review what is known about interventions to improve recruitment to trials. We describe a proposed business approach to trials and discuss the implementation of using a businessmodel, using insights gained from three case studies. PMID:21396088

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are generally regarded as the gold standard for evaluating health care interventions. The level of uncertainty around a trial's estimate of effect is, however, frequently linked to how successful the trial has been in recruiting and retaining participants. As recruitment is often slower or more difficult than expected, with many trials failing to reach their target sample size within the timescale and funding originally envisaged, the results are often less reliable than they could have been. The high number of trials that require an extension to the recruitment period in order to reach the required sample size potentially delays the introduction of more effective therapies into routine clinical practice. Moreover, it may result in less research being undertaken as resources are redirected to extending existing trials rather than funding additional studies.Poor recruitment to publicly-funded RCTs has been much debated but there remains remarkably little clear evidence as to why many trials fail to recruit well, which recruitment methods work, in which populations and settings and for what type of intervention. One proposed solution to improving recruitment and retention is to adopt methodology from the business world to inform and structure trial management techniques.We review what is known about interventions to improve recruitment to trials. We describe a proposed business approach to trials and discuss the implementation of using a businessmodel, using insights gained from three case studies. PMID:21396088

Based on an in-depth analysis of the existing approaches in applying semantic technologies to business process management (BPM) research in the perspective of cross-enterprise collaboration or so-called business-to-business integration, we analyse, discuss and compare methodologies, applications and best practices of the surveyed approaches with the proposed criteria. This article identifies various relevant research directions in semantic BPM (SBPM). Founded on the result of our investigation, we summarise the state of art of SBPM. We also address areas and directions for further research activities.

In recent years, both practitioners and applied researchers have become increasingly interested in methods for integrating business process models and enterprise software systems through the deployment of enabling middleware. Integrative BPM research has been mainly focusing on the conversion of workflow notations into enacted application procedures, and less effort has been invested in enhancing the connectivity between design level, non-workflow business process models and related enactment systems such as: ERP, SCM and CRM. This type of integration is useful at several stages of an IT system lifecycle, from design and implementation through change management, upgrades and rollout. The paper presents an integration method that utilizes SOA for connecting business process models with corresponding enterprise software systems. The method is then demonstrated through an Oracle E-Business Suite procurement process and its ERP transactions.

Many regulators, utilities, customer groups, and other stakeholders are reevaluating existing regulatory models and the roles and financial implications for electric utilities in the context of today’s environment of increasing distributed energy resource (DER) penetrations, forecasts of significant T&D investment, and relatively flat or negative utility sales growth. When this is coupled with predictions about fewer grid-connected customers (i.e., customer defection), there is growing concern about the potential for serious negative impacts on the regulated utility businessmodel. Among states engaged in these issues, the range of topics under consideration is broad. Most of these states are considering whether approaches that have been applied historically to mitigate the impacts of previous “disruptions” to the regulated utility businessmodel (e.g., energy efficiency) as well as to align utility financial interests with increased adoption of such “disruptive technologies” (e.g., shareholder incentive mechanisms, lost revenue mechanisms) are appropriate and effective in the present context. A handful of states are presently considering more fundamental changes to regulatory models and the role of regulated utilities in the ownership, management, and operation of electric delivery systems (e.g., New York “Reforming the Energy Vision” proceeding).

This article examines the appropriateness of the Business Excellence Model in developing a strategy for Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust to measure organisational performance. The need for a strategy to measure organisational performance and to improve organisational performance was highlighted with the production of the Government White Paper, The New NHS: Modern and Dependable. At the heart of recommendations there is emphasis on improving quality and driving efficiency. Greater emphasis will be placed on organisations measuring their performance. By utilising the conceptual framework, which consisted of The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) Model, it became evident that, although tools were in existence within Bolton Hospitals to measure organisational performance, several critical areas needed addressing. By addressing these key areas, the organisation could begin to work towards its goal of business excellence. The conclusions drawn from this project demonstrated that there was scope for Bolton Hospitals to improve on organisational performance. It was highlighted that the Trust was functioning well in some areas of the EFQM Model, but not in others. For Bolton Hospitals NHS Trust to improve organisational performance, the EFQM Model should be adopted. PMID:10537855

In September 2007, the Engineering Directorate at the Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) created the Design System Focus Team (DSFT). MSFC was responsible for the in-house design and development of the Ares 1 Upper Stage and the Engineering Directorate was preparing to deploy a new electronic Configuration Management and Data Management System with the Design Data Management System (DDMS) based upon a Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) Product Data Management (PDM) System. The DSFT was to establish standardized CAD practices and a new data life cycle for design data. Of special interest here, the design teams were to implement ModelBased Definition (MBD) in support of the Upper Stage manufacturing contract. It is noted that this MBD does use partially dimensioned drawings for auxiliary information to the model. The design data lifecycle implemented several new release states to be used prior to formal release that allowed the models to move through a flow of progressive maturity. The DSFT identified some 17 Lessons Learned as outcomes of the standards development, pathfinder deployments and initial application to the Upper Stage design completion. Some of the high value examples are reviewed.

Spatial data and imagery generators are set to become tomorrow's key players in the information society. This is why satellite owners and operators are examining new revenue-producing models for developing space-related products and services. The use and availability of broadband internet width and satellite data-based services will continue to increase in the future. With the capacity to deliver real time precision downstream data, space agencies and the satellite industry can respond to the demand for high resolution digital space information which, with the appropriate technology, can be integrated into a variety of web-based applications. At a time when the traditional roles of space agencies are becoming more hybrid, largely as a result of the greater drive towards commercial markets, new value-added markets for space-related information products are continuing to attract attention. This paper discusses whether traditional data policies on space data access and IP licensing schemes stand to remain the feasible prototype for distributing and marketing space data, and how this growth market might benefit from looking at an 'up and running' global IP management system already operating to manage end user digital demand. PrefaceThe terminology describing the various types of spatial data and space-based information is not uniformly used within the various principles, laws and policies that govern space data. For convenience only this paper refers to primary or raw data gathered by the space-based industry as spatial or raw data, and the data as processed and sold on or distributed by ground-based companies as space information products and services. In practise, spatial data range from generic to specific data sets, digital topography, through to pictures and imagery services at various resolutions, with 3-D perspectives underway. The paper addresses general IP considerations relating to spatial data, with some reference to remote sensing itself. Exact IP details

Chemicals indisputably contribute greatly to the well-being of modern societies. Apart from such benefits, however, chemicals often pose serious threats to human health and the environment when improperly handled. Therefore, the European Commission has proposed a regulatory framework for the Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals (REACH) that requires companies using chemicals to gather pertinent information on the properties of these substances. In this article, we argue that the crucial aspect of this information management may be the honesty and accuracy of the transfer of relevant knowledge from the producer of a chemical to its user. This may be particularly true if the application of potentially hazardous chemicals is not part of the user's core competency. Against this background, we maintain that the traditional sales concept provides no incentives for transferring this knowledge. The reason is that increased user knowledge of a chemical's properties may raise the efficiency of its application. That is, excessive and unnecessary usage will be eliminated. This, in turn, would lower the amount of chemicals sold and in competitive markets directly decrease profits of the producer. Through the introduction of chemical leasing businessmodels, we attempt to present a strategy to overcome the incentive structure of classical sales models, which is counterproductive for the transfer of knowledge. By introducing two models (a Model A that differs least and a Model B that differs most from traditional sales concepts), we demonstrate that chemical leasing businessmodels are capable of accomplishing the goal of Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals: to effectively manage the risk of chemicals by reducing the total quantity of chemicals used, either by a transfer of applicable knowledge from the lessor to the lessee (Model A) or by efficient application of the chemical by the lessor him/herself (Model B). PMID:17958507

This work-in-progress paper presents an exploration of a network of Swedish municipal authorities. Within this network, we have observed a move from isolated innovation to leveraging inflows and outflows of knowledge in a manner characteristic of the open innovation paradigm. This paper presents a characterization of these knowledge exchanges using an existing framework of open innovation archetypes, as well as an initial description of the businessmodel impacts of this innovation approach on the participant municipalities, and the enabling role of information technology. The paper concludes by drawing preliminary conclusions and outlining ongoing research.

Remote patient management (RPM) is a transformative technology that improves chronic care management while reducing net spending for chronic disease. Broadly deployed within the Veterans Health Administration and in many small trials elsewhere, RPM has been shown to support patient self-management, shift responsibilities to non-clinical providers, and reduce the use of emergency department and hospital services. Because transformative technologies offer major opportunities to advance national goals of improved quality and efficiency in health care, it is important to understand their evolution, the experiences of early adopters, and the businessmodels that may support their deployment. PMID:19124862

Rankings of academics can be constructed in two different ways, either based on journal rankings or based on citations. Although citation-based rankings promise some fundamental advantages they are still not common in German-speaking business administration. However, the choice of the underlying database is crucial. This article argues that for…

The way the Internet has connected millions of users at negligible costs has changed playing field for companies. Several stakeholders can now come together in virtual networks to create innovative businessmodels that would be unfeasible in the physical world. However, the more radical the departure from the established models of value creation, the bigger the complexity in ensuring the sustained interest of the involved parties and the stability of the bonds. To address this problem, we sought inspiration in the Actor-Network Theory (ANT), which is capable of providing insights into socio-technical settings where human and non-human agents interact. We describe how several of its principles, ideas, and concepts were adapted and embedded in our approach for complex businessmodel design or analysis. A simple illustration is provided. Our iterative approach helps systematically scrutinize and tune the contributions and returns of the various actors, ensuring that all end up with an attractive value proposal, thus promoting the robustness of the network. Guidelines for the services that an underlying information system must provide are also derived from the results.

The Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) market is still in an early stage of development. Previous approaches of comprehensive AAL services are mostly supply-side driven and focused on hardware and software. Usually this type of AAL solutions does not lead to a sustainable success on the market. Research and development increasingly focuses on demand and customer requirements in addition to the social and legal framework. The question is: How can a systematic performance measurement strategy along a service development process support the market-ready design of a concrete businessmodel for AAL service? Within the EU funded research project DALIA (Assistant for Daily Life Activities at Home) an iterative service development process uses an adapted Osterwalder businessmodel canvas. The application of a performance measurement index (PMI) to support the process has been developed and tested. Development of an iterative service development model using a supporting PMI. The PMI framework is developed throughout the engineering of a virtual assistant (AVATAR) as a modular interface to connect informal carers with necessary and useful services. Future research should seek to ensure that the PMI enables meaningful transparency regarding targeting (e.g. innovative AAL service), design (e.g. functional hybrid AAL service) and implementation (e.g. marketable AAL support services). To this end, a further reference to further testing practices is required. The aim must be to develop a weighted PMI in the context of further research, which supports both the service engineering and the subsequent service management process. PMID:26063267

Agent-basedmodeling is a powerful simulation modeling technique that has seen a number of applications in the last few years, including applications to real-world business problems. After the basic principles of agent-based simulation are briefly introduced, its four areas of application are discussed by using real-world applications: flow simulation, organizational simulation, market simulation, and diffusion simulation. For each category, one or several business applications are described and analyzed. PMID:12011407

This slide presentation reviews the Space Life Sciences Directorate (SLSD) new businessmodel for problem solving, with emphasis on open collaboration and innovation. The topics that are discussed are: an overview of the work of the Space Life Sciences Directorate and the strategic initiatives that arrived at the new businessmodel. A new businessmodel was required to infuse open collaboration/innovation tools into existing models for research, development and operations (research announcements, procurements, SBIR/STTR etc). This new model involves use of several open innovation partnerships: InnoCentive, Yet2.com, TopCoder and NASA@work. There is also a new organizational structure developed to facilitate the joint collaboration with other NASA centers, international partners, other U.S. Governmental organizations, Academia, Corporate, and Non-Profit organizations: the NASA Human Health and Performance Center (NHHPC).

Business objects (BOs) are data containers for complex data structures used in business applications such as Supply Chain Management and Customer Relationship Management. Due to the replication of application logic, multiple copies of BOs are created which have to be synchronized and updated. This is a complex and time consuming task because BOs rigorously vary in their structure according to the distribution, number and size of elements. Since BOs are internally represented as XML documents, the parsing of XML is one major cost factor which has to be considered for minimizing the processing time during synchronization. The prediction of the parsing time for BOs is an significant property for the selection of an efficient synchronization mechanism. In this paper, we present a method to evaluate the influence of the structure of BOs on their parsing time. The results of our experimental evaluation incorporating four different XML parsers examine the dependencies between the distribution of elements and the parsing time. Finally, a general cost model will be validated and simplified according to the results of the experimental setup.

Motivated by recent empirical studies of business firm growth, we develop a dynamic percolation model which captures some of the features of the economical system—i.e., merging and splitting of business firms—represented as aggregates on a d -dimensional lattice. We find the steady-state distribution of the aggregate size and explore how this distribution depends on the model parameters. We find that at the critical threshold, the standard deviation of the aggregate growth rates, σ , increases with aggregate size S as σ˜Sβ , where β can be explained in terms of the connectedness length exponent ν and the fractal dimension df , with β=1/(2νdf)≈0.20 for d=2 and 0.125 for d→∞ . The distributions of aggregate growth rates have a sharp peak at the center and pronounced wings extending over many standard deviations, giving the distribution a tent-shape form—the Laplace distribution. The distributions for different aggregate sizes scaled by their standard deviations collapse onto the same curve.

Adopting a multilevel theoretical framework, we examined how metacognitive and motivational cultural intelligence influence an individual's commitment to the study of international business (IB). Data from 292 undergraduate and graduate business students nested in 12 U.S. business school classes demonstrated that individuals'…

According to many researchers of organizational theory, a great number of problems encountered by the manufacturing firms are due to their ineffectiveness to respond to significant changes of their external environment and align their competitive strategy accordingly. From this point of view, the pursuit of the appropriate generic strategy is vital for firms facing a dynamic and highly competitive environment. In the present paper, we adopt Porter's typology to operationalise organizational strategy (cost leadership, innovative and marketing differentiation, and focus) considering changes in the external business environment (dynamism, complexity and munificence). Although simulation of social events is a quite difficult task, since there are so many considerations (not all well understood) involved, in the present study we developed a dynamic system based on the conceptual framework of strategy-environment associations.

Over the past decade, numerous business schools have begun experimenting with studio-based inquiry, often drawing inspiration from professional studios used within art and design schools and from business and governmental studios used for problem-solving and innovation. Business school studios vary considerably in form, ranging from temporary…

Small Business Administration, Washington, DC. Office of Business Development.

This guide offers first-time business persons information as well as administrative and operational techniques for one-person business enterprises that have low initial start-up costs and low operational and overhead costs. These one-person businesses can be home based or have site locations outside the home. Included in this guide is a list of…

the functioning of the BX-C, in which the "segment-specific functions" appear as segment-specific enhancers regulating, Ubx, abd-A, or Abd-B (Peifer et al. 1987). Key to their model was that the segmental address of these enhancers was not an inherent ability of the enhancers themselves, but was determined by the chromosomal location in which they lay. In their view, the sequential activation of the segment-specific functions resulted from the sequential opening of chromatin domains along the chromosome as one moves from anterior to posterior. This model soon became known of as the open for businessmodel. While the open for businessmodel is quite easy to visualize at a conceptual level, molecular evidence to validate this model has been missing for almost 30 years. The recent publication describing the outstanding, joint effort from the Bender and Kingston laboratories now provides the missing proof to support this model (Bowman et al. 2014). The purpose of this article is to review the open for businessmodel and take the reader through the genetic arguments that led to its elaboration. PMID:26067031

This paper describes the transition that the Anisfield School of Business of Ramapo College of New Jersey made from a conventional Writing Across the Curriculum approach to a Writing Across the Business Core approach. The impetus for the change is explained as well as the creation and design of the program. The document driven program is analyzed,…

This study aims to evaluate the selection of metaphors in a published business English textbook using findings from a specialised corpus of written business English. While most scholars agree that metaphors should be included in English for Specific Purposes (ESP) syllabuses as a potentially problematic area in successful language learning, it is…

University business incubators give businesses access to labs and equipment, scientific-technical knowledge, networks, and reputation. A study of incubators in Italy shows they do not resolve inadequate funding or lack of management and financial skills. However, the networking capacity can offset these problems. (Contains 25 notes/references.)…

This manual provides curriculum materials for implementing a career exploration class in business and office occupations within a Practical Arts Education program for middle/junior high school students. Introductory materials include the program master sequence, list of business and office occupations, and an overview of the competency-based…

This review forms the background to explore and to gain empirical support among lecturers to improve the students' critical thinking skills in business education courses in Malaysia, in which the main teaching and learning methodology is Problem-Based Learning (PBL). The PBL educational approach is known to have maximum positive impacts in…

Reports on one phase of a 3-year investigation of case-based learning and teaching that was carried out in a Hong Kong university. Findings provided direction for an English for specific purposes business communications course and highlighted the need for culture and context-specific preparation for case leaders and students. (Author/VWL)

North Carolina State Dept. of Public Instruction, Raleigh. Div. of Vocational Education.

This teacher handbook provides recommended goals and objectives and suggested measures for competency-based courses in the vocational program area of business and office education. A background and overview section contains the philosophy and rationale, discusses thinking skills and programs for exceptional children, and provides notes that…

This document presents in three parts the bases for curriculum decisions in the development of a post-secondary curriculum for minorities in small business ownership and management. Part 1 covers the general curriculum decisions, including the following items: selection of curriculum testing site; academic credits; class scheduling; student…

This study examined the impact of two Problem-Based Learning (PBL) approaches on knowledge transfer, problem-solving self-efficacy, and perceived learning gains among four intact classes of adult learners engaged in a group project in an online undergraduate business research methods course. With two of the classes using a text-only PBL workbook…

The use of experiential learning techniques has become popular in business education. Experiential learning approaches offer major benefits for teaching contemporary management practices such as cross-functional and team-based working. However, there remains relatively little empirical data on the success of experiential pedagogies in supporting…

In this paper, there will be a particular focus on mental models and their application to inductive reasoning within the realm of instruction. A basic assumption of this study is the observation that the construction of mental models and related reasoning is a slowly developing capability of cognitive systems that emerges effectively with proper…

Domain-specific knowledge is required to create specifications, generate code, and understand existing systems. Our approach to automating software design is based on instantiating an application domain model with industry-specific knowledge and then using that model to achieve the operational goals of specification elicitation and verification, reverse engineering, and code generation. Although many different specification models can be created from any particular domain model, each specification model is consistent and correct with respect to the domain model.

Biorepositories offer tremendous scientific value to a wide variety of customer groups (academic, commercial, industrial) in their ability to deliver a centralized, standardized service model, encompassing both biospecimen storage and related laboratory services. Generally, the scientific expertise and economies of scale that are offered in centralized, properly resourced research biobanks has yielded value that has been well-recognized by universities, pharmaceutical companies, and other sponsoring institutions. However, like many facets of the economy, biobanks have been under increasing cost pressure in recent years. This has been a particular problem in the academic arena, where direct support from grant sources (both governmental and philanthropic) typically now is more difficult to secure, or provides reduced financial support, relative to previous years. One way to address this challenge is to establish or enhance a well-defined fee-for-service model which is properly calibrated to cover operational costs while still offering competitive value to users. In this model, customers are never charged for the biospecimens themselves, but rather for the laboratory services associated with them. Good communication practices, proper assessment of value, implementation of best practices, and a sound business plan are all needed for this initiative to succeed. Here we summarize our experiences at Washington University School of Medicine in the expectation they will be useful to others. PMID:23386922

Biorepositories offer tremendous scientific value to a wide variety of customer groups (academic, commercial, industrial) in their ability to deliver a centralized, standardized service model, encompassing both biospecimen storage and related laboratory services. Generally, the scientific expertise and economies of scale that are offered in centralized, properly resourced research biobanks has yielded value that has been well-recognized by universities, pharmaceutical companies, and other sponsoring institutions. However, like many facets of the economy, biobanks have been under increasing cost pressure in recent years. This has been a particular problem in the academic arena, where direct support from grant sources (both governmental and philanthropic) typically now is more difficult to secure, or provides reduced financial support, relative to previous years. One way to address this challenge is to establish or enhance a well-defined fee-for-service model which is properly calibrated to cover operational costs while still offering competitive value to users. In this model, customers are never charged for the biospecimens themselves, but rather for the laboratory services associated with them. Good communication practices, proper assessment of value, implementation of best practices, and a sound business plan are all needed for this initiative to succeed. Here we summarize our experiences at Washington University School of Medicine in the expectation they will be useful to others. PMID:23386922

This report describes a ModelsBased Engineering (MBE) philosophy and implementation strategy that has been developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory`s Center for Advanced Engineering Technology. A major theme in this discussion is that modelsbased engineering is an information management technology enabling the development of information driven engineering. Unlike other information management technologies, modelsbased engineering encompasses the breadth of engineering information, from design intent through product definition to consumer application.

A study was conducted at College of Lake County (Illinois) in spring 1993 to assess the impact of instructor role-modeling among students enrolled in an Introduction to Business course. The course included a three-part Stock Market Project (SMP) accounting for 32% of students' final grade. Among a course section of control group students, the…

In education, as in business, management is concerned with three production factors: human resources, finances, and technology. Differences between the education and business spheres become apparent when a comparison is made of the installation of a new piece of engineering equipment with the orientation of a new teacher. If as much care was taken…

Studies on students' perceptions of learning in business simulations often suggest that students like simulations and view them more positively than both lectures and case discussions. However, research on the actual learning outcomes deriving from participating in business simulations still needs to be pursued. Consequently, the purpose of…

Purpose: Pedagogy today has become a function of technology and this relationship becomes all the more promising when used to address the educational needs of the constantly changing and fast evolving business school education. Business schools today are responsible for empowering future managers and leaders with not only the knowledge and…

This manuscript is part of a stream of continuing research examining market orientation within higher education and its potential impact on organizational performance. The organizations researched are business schools and the data collected came from chairpersons of accounting departments of AACSB member business schools. We use a reworded Narver…

Students enrolled in business and management assessed the research supervisory process less favorably when compared with their counterparts. In this article, the authors found that there was considerable dissatisfaction with the interaction and relationships that students had with their supervisors, especially within the business program. As a…

This document, which is intended for teachers of high school-level business education courses, contains both the academic standards for business education in Wisconsin secondary schools that were disseminated in 1998 and learning activities to enable students to meet the standards. The activities were developed for students completing grade 12 and…

High performance computing (HPC) service centres are a vital part of the academic infrastructure of higher education organisations. However, despite their importance for research and the necessary high capital expenditures, business research on HPC service centres is mostly missing. From a business perspective, it is important to find an answer to…

We consider the appearance of multiple scalar fields in SFT inspired non-local models with a single scalar field at late times. In this regime all the scalar fields are free. This system minimally coupled to gravity is mainly analyzed in this note. We build one exact solution to the equations of motion. We consider an exactly solvable model which obeys a simple exact solution in the cosmological context for the Friedmann equations and that reproduces the behavior expected from SFT in the asymptotic regime.

The introduction of ID cards enhanced with electronic authentication services opens up the possibility to use these for identification and authentication in e-business applications. To avoid incompatible national solutions, the specification of the European Citizen Card aims at defining interoperable services for such use cases. Especially the given device authentication methods can help to eliminate security problems with current e-business and online banking applications.

The application by an academic health center of business principles to the conduct of clinical research is described. Re-engineering of the infrastructure for clinical research at the University of Wisconsin and University of Wisconsin Hospital and Clinics began in 1990 with the creation of the Center for Clinical Trials (CCT) and the restructuring of the investigational drug services (IDS). Strategies to further improve the institution's clinical research activities have been continually assessed and most recently have centered on the adaptation of a business philosophy within the institution's multidisciplinary research infrastructure. Toward that end, the CCT and IDS have introduced basic business principles into operational activities. Four basic business concepts have been implemented: viewing the research protocol as a commodity, seeking payment for services rendered, tracking investments, and assessing performance. It is proposed that incorporation of these basic business concepts is not only compatible with the infrastructure for clinical research but beneficial to that infrastructure. The adaptation of a business mindset is likely to enable an academic health center to reach its clinical research goals. PMID:10030512

Procedural modeling systems, rule basedmodeling systems, and a method for converting a procedural model to a rule basedmodel are described. Simulation models are used to represent real time engineering systems. A real time system can be represented by a set of equations or functions connected so that they perform in the same manner as the actual system. Most modeling system languages are based on FORTRAN or some other procedural language. Therefore, they must be enhanced with a reaction capability. Rule based systems are reactive by definition. Once the engineering system has been decomposed into a set of calculations using only basic algebraic unary operations, a knowledge network of calculations and functions can be constructed. The knowledge network required by a rule based system can be generated by a knowledge acquisition tool or a source level compiler. The compiler would take an existing model source file, a syntax template, and a symbol table and generate the knowledge network. Thus, existing procedural models can be translated and executed by a rule based system. Neural models can be provide the high capacity data manipulation required by the most complex real time models.

Business people, especially marketing researchers, are keen to understand peoples' potential sense of value to create fascinating topics stimulating peoples' interest. In this paper, we aim at finding influential people, comments, and terms contributing the discovery of such topics. For this purpose, we propose an Influence Diffusion Model in text-based communication, where the influence of people, comments, and terms are defined as the degree of text-based relevance of messages. We apply this model to Bulletin Board Service(BBS) on the Internet, and present our discoveries on experimental evaluations.

This instructor's guide, which is designed to assist teachers in providing instruction and technical support to small business owners and managers, contains 17 competency-based units of instruction on the following areas that both small business instructors and small business owners have deemed critical to the success of any business:…

While a great deal of literature on embedded librarians in academic libraries is focused on the role of instructor, there are many other services that could be provided by librarians working closely with students. The Kresge Business Administration Library (Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan) has created a unique…

The businessmodel for medical therapy development has changed drastically. Large companies that once conducted their own Research and Development (R&D) and funded all the preclinical studies, all phases of clinical development and marketing of the products are increasingly turning to others for more and more of the earlier work in hopes of being able to in-license a de-risked program well downstream, take it through the final phases of clinical development and into the marketplace. This new paradigm has required patient-advocacy foundations, especially in the rare-disease space, to become far more effective in building relationships with all the players along the therapy-development pathway -- academic scientists, government agencies, other foundations with overlapping interests, biotechs, small biopharmaceutical entities and even the larger industry companies. From the perspective of the patient-advocacy community, these increasingly essential public-private partnerships have taken on the nature of what could be called joint-venture philanthropy and involve a broad spectrum of collaborations and financial relationships between foundations and industry partners that are not without concerns about potential conflicts of interest. PMID:24283968

Despite the rapid growth of retail clinics (RCs), literature is limited in terms of how these facilities offer preventive services, particularly vaccination services. The purpose of this study was to obtain an in-depth understanding of the RC businessmodel pertaining to vaccine offerings, profitability, and decision making. From March to June 2009, we conducted 15 interviews with key individuals from three types of organizations: 12 representatives of RC corporations, 2 representatives of retail hosts (i.e., stores in which the RCs are located), and 1 representative of an industry association. We analyzed interview transcripts qualitatively. Our results indicate that consumer demand and profitability were the main drivers in offering vaccinations. RCs in this sample primarily offered vaccinations to adults and adolescents, and they were not well integrated with local public health and immunization registries. Our findings demonstrate the potential for stronger linkages with public health in these settings. The findings also may help inform future research to increase patient access to vaccination services at RCs. PMID:26720987

Information technology (IT) environments are characterized by complex changes and rapid evolution. Globalization and the spread of technological innovation have increased the need for new strategic information resources, both from individual firms and management environments. Improvements in multidisciplinary methods and, particularly, the availability of powerful computational tools, are giving researchers an increasing opportunity to investigate management environments in their true complex nature. The adoption of a complex systems approach allows for modelingbusiness strategies from a bottom-up perspective — understood as resulting from repeated and local interaction of economic agents — without disregarding the consequences of the business strategies themselves to individual behavior of enterprises, emergence of interaction patterns between firms and management environments. Agent-basedmodels are at the leading approach of this attempt.

The principal source of vibratory excitation of gear system is the unsteady component of the relative angular motion of pair of meshing spur gears. This vibratory excitation is described by the transmission error. The transmission error present itself as a varying force at the contact point of the meshing gear teeth. The varying force is also influenced by the varying tooth stiffness due to change of orientation of teeth relative to each other, during the contact phase of each pair. Such a varying force produces both lateral and torsional excitation to the gear system. This paper presents analytical formulation of a simple two meshing spur gear system as a three mass system (18 DOF). The mathematical model also incorporates the analytical formulation of the tooth stiffness. The analytical results are compared with the experimental results. At this stage of analysis the procedure developed for handling the nonlinear influences of the tooth geometry is not fully implemented and the tooth stiffness taken as a constant value representing the average tooth stiffness. The comparison between the analytical and experimental results are encouraging as three main frequency obtained from FFT of the experimental results correlates very closely with the analytical results.

In the face of changing agriculture, an aging population, and the outflow of citizens seeking livable wages, rural Southern communities are challenged with how to enhance their economies to insure long-term business viability. Home-basedbusinesses are an effective aspect of rural economic development. They allow flexibility and choice of work…

Syndication has long been a fundamental organizing principle in the entertainment world, but it's been rare elsewhere in business. The fixed physical assets and slow-moving information that characterized the industrial economy made it difficult, if not impossible, to create the kind of fluid networks that are essential for syndication. But with the rise of the information economy, flexible business networks are not only becoming possible, they're becoming essential. As a result, syndication is moving from business's periphery to its center. Within a syndication network there are three roles that businesses can play. Originators create original content, which encompasses everything from entertainment programming to products to business processes. Syndicators package that content, often integrating it with content from other originators. Distributors deliver the content to consumers. A company can play a single role, or it can play two or three roles simultaneously. Syndication requires businesses to rethink their strategies and relationships in radical ways. Because a company's success hinges on its connections to other companies, it can no longer view its core capabilities as secrets to protect. Instead, it needs to see them as products to sell. FedEx, for example, is succeeding by distributing its sophisticated package-tracking capability to other companies on the Net. Syndication promises to change the nature of business. As this new way of doing business takes hold, companies may look the same as before to their customers, but behind the scenes they will be in constant flux, melding with one another in ever-changing, self-organizing networks. PMID:11183981

Agent-basedmodeling and simulation (ABMS) is a new approach to modeling systems comprised of autonomous, interacting agents. ABMS promises to have far-reaching effects on the way that businesses use computers to support decision-making and researchers use electronic laboratories to support their research. Some have gone so far as to contend that ABMS is a third way of doing science besides deductive and inductive reasoning. Computational advances have made possible a growing number of agent-based applications in a variety of fields. Applications range from modeling agent behavior in the stock market and supply chains, to predicting the spread of epidemics and the threat of bio-warfare, from modeling consumer behavior to understanding the fall of ancient civilizations, to name a few. This tutorial describes the theoretical and practical foundations of ABMS, identifies toolkits and methods for developing ABMS models, and provides some thoughts on the relationship between ABMS and traditional modeling techniques.

System safety analysis techniques are well established and are used extensively during the design of safety-critical systems. Despite this, most of the techniques are highly subjective and dependent on the skill of the practitioner. Since these analyses are usually based on an informal system model, it is unlikely that they will be complete, consistent, and error free. In fact, the lack of precise models of the system architecture and its failure modes often forces the safety analysts to devote much of their effort to gathering architectural details about the system behavior from several sources and embedding this information in the safety artifacts such as the fault trees. This report describes Model-Based Safety Analysis, an approach in which the system and safety engineers share a common system model created using a model-based development process. By extending the system model with a fault model as well as relevant portions of the physical system to be controlled, automated support can be provided for much of the safety analysis. We believe that by using a common model for both system and safety engineering and automating parts of the safety analysis, we can both reduce the cost and improve the quality of the safety analysis. Here we present our vision of model-based safety analysis and discuss the advantages and challenges in making this approach practical.

The Business Core is typically a set of courses in the curriculum of many business schools which provides the student with a breadth of knowledge across all business disciplines. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a curricular modelbased upon the balanced scorecard (BSC) developed by Kaplan & Norton (1996). With its multi-dimensional…

The Clark and Estes (2008) Gap Analysis Process Model (Gap Analysis) was used to examine the reasons 33% of freshmen students do not participate in the Burke School of Business, Business Abroad Experience (BAE) program at New Wave University (NWU). The purpose of this study was to understand the considerations students make in their…

Constraint basedmodeling has seen applications in many microorganisms. For example, there are now established methods to determine potential genetic modifications and external interventions to increase the efficiency of microbial strains in chemical production pipelines. In addition, multiple models of multicellular organisms have been created including plants and humans. While initially the focus here was on modeling individual cell types of the multicellular organism, this focus recently started to switch. Models of microbial communities, as well as multi-tissue models of higher organisms have been constructed. These models thereby can include different parts of a plant, like root, stem, or different tissue types in the same organ. Such models can elucidate details of the interplay between symbiotic organisms, as well as the concerted efforts of multiple tissues and can be applied to analyse the effects of drugs or mutations on a more systemic level. In this review we give an overview of the recent development of multi-tissue models using constraint based techniques and the methods employed when investigating these models. We further highlight advances in combining constraint basedmodels with dynamic and regulatory information and give an overview of these types of hybrid or multi-level approaches. PMID:26904548

Modeling Guru is an on-line knowledge-sharing resource for anyone involved with or interested in NASA's scientific models or High End Computing (HEC) systems. Developed and maintained by the NASA's Software Integration and Visualization Office (SIVO) and the NASA Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), Modeling Guru's combined forums and knowledge base for research and collaboration is becoming a repository for the accumulated expertise of NASA's scientific modeling and HEC communities. All NASA modelers and associates are encouraged to participate and provide knowledge about the models and systems so that other users may benefit from their experience. Modeling Guru is divided into a hierarchy of communities, each with its own set forums and knowledge base documents. Current modeling communities include those for space science, land and atmospheric dynamics, atmospheric chemistry, and oceanography. In addition, there are communities focused on NCCS systems, HEC tools and libraries, and programming and scripting languages. Anyone may view most of the content on Modeling Guru (available at http://modelingguru.nasa.gov/), but you must log in to post messages and subscribe to community postings. The site offers a full range of "Web 2.0" features, including discussion forums, "wiki" document generation, document uploading, RSS feeds, search tools, blogs, email notification, and "breadcrumb" links. A discussion (a.k.a. forum "thread") is used to post comments, solicit feedback, or ask questions. If marked as a question, SIVO will monitor the thread, and normally respond within a day. Discussions can include embedded images, tables, and formatting through the use of the Rich Text Editor. Also, the user can add "Tags" to their thread to facilitate later searches. The "knowledge base" is comprised of documents that are used to capture and share expertise with others. The default "wiki" document lets users edit within the browser so others can easily collaborate on the

Using Porter's five-forces model (potential entrants, suppliers, buyers, rivalry, substitutes) to analyze competition in Canadian university business schools, the authors conclude that schools are becoming increasingly vulnerable to competitive pressures and that strategic reorientation is necessary. (SK)

This paper describes the businessmodel of municipally-owned MSW (municipal solid waste) companies in Sweden. A comparative study of two of these companies shows that they combine three types of activities: public service activities that collect solid waste from households, commercial establishments, and industry; processing activities that transform this waste; and marketing activities that enable products and recycled material to re-enter the economy. The historical success of the two companies rests on their ability to create value by combining these three distinct yet mutually dependent types of activities. However, an ongoing legal controversy may develop into a threat to this businessmodel and to the entire organization of Swedish waste management. PMID:22194358

Successful business training by foreigners in Russia must consider the contemporary climate for training and human resource management; characteristics of the Russian audience; and cultural issues in the use of simulation, hard versus soft content, and working with a translator. (SK)

Business students appreciate working on classroom projects that are both enjoyable and useful in preparing them for future careers. Promoting competition among project teams is also used as a method to motivate students. The Humanitarian Logistics Project (HLP) teaches undergraduate students the logistical implications of unsolicited material…

Three areas in which extension specialists can assist food industry entrepreneurs include (1) awareness of the components of a business plan, (2) pro forma financial analysis, and (3) legal issues affecting the food industry. In addition to specialized expertise, extension professionals can help with making contacts, objectively review business…

This study investigates the effect of Emotional Intelligence (EQ) training on student satisfaction with the collaborative writing process and product. Business communication students at an AACSB-accredited state university worked collaboratively on writing assignments in pre-and post-EQ-training sessions. Pre-and post-training surveys measured…

The scholarship of teaching and learning approach and input of key stakeholders provide a multidimensional framework for evaluating business capstone courses. Steps include identifying standards and practices for benchmarking, identifying faculty perceptions of core knowledge and skills, collecting student feedback, and including the perspectives…

An observational study has been carried out to analyse differences in performance between students of different undergraduate curricula in the same written business administration examination, focusing particularly on possible effects of "integrated" or "multi-modular" examinations, a recently widespread format in Italian…

Using a participant-observer perspective, this comparative case study sought to identify similarities between business and education to contribute to charter school training, leadership development, and school reform. This inquiry is a qualitative comparative case study using a participant observer perspective presented in a scholarly personal…

An optional course, "Geographical Aspects of Business" in the framework of the Bachelor of management program in the Lomonosov Moscow State University Business School is setting the goal to introduce future discipline specialists with geographical topics of current interest for management and provide knowledge, skills and expertise of geospatial analysis and the use of geoinformation technologies in finding solutions to economic and managerial tasks. The students' feedback shows interest and demand for such a course for management students. The course has an interdisciplinary links with the main subjects such as marketing, public administration, visual communication, etc., and is based on the set of business cases dealing with Web-GIS Services, LBS, Geomarketing, Spatial analysis, etc. Open Data and corporate geodata sets are used. The pragmatist approach is selected for successful accomplishment of the course's goal, which is based on using Web-GIS tools. The Geomixer - a free web- GIS product by the company SCANEX - is chosen to be one of them. The principle "I do - I analyze" helps to minimize the theoretic constituent of the course improving the outcome of the classes. Owing to innovative methods of teaching, the educational goal of the course is achieved to the full scope despite the small number of allocated hours. The classes surely improve both the general level of geographic competence of students and provide them with the skills to work with GIS. Such optional courses will undoubtedly contribute to the development of GIS-education in management administration.

We study firm collaborations in the life sciences and the information and communication technology sectors. We propose an approach to characterize industrial leadership using k -shell decomposition, with top-ranking firms in terms of market value in higher k -shell layers. We find that the life sciences industry network consists of three distinct components: a "nucleus," which is a small well-connected subgraph, "tendrils," which are small subgraphs consisting of small degree nodes connected exclusively to the nucleus, and a "bulk body," which consists of the majority of nodes. Industrial leaders, i.e., the largest companies in terms of market value, are in the highest k -shells of both networks. The nucleus of the life sciences sector is very stable: once a firm enters the nucleus, it is likely to stay there for a long time. At the same time we do not observe the above three components in the information and communication technology sector. We also conduct a systematic study of these three components in random scale-free networks. Our results suggest that the sizes of the nucleus and the tendrils in scale-free networks decrease as the exponent of the power-law degree distribution lambda increases, and disappear for lambda>or=3 . We compare the k -shell structure of random scale-free model networks with two real-world business firm networks in the life sciences and in the information and communication technology sectors. We argue that the observed behavior of the k -shell structure in the two industries is consistent with the coexistence of both preferential and random agreements in the evolution of industrial networks. PMID:20365825

We study firm collaborations in the life sciences and the information and communication technology sectors. We propose an approach to characterize industrial leadership using k -shell decomposition, with top-ranking firms in terms of market value in higher k -shell layers. We find that the life sciences industry network consists of three distinct components: a “nucleus,” which is a small well-connected subgraph, “tendrils,” which are small subgraphs consisting of small degree nodes connected exclusively to the nucleus, and a “bulk body,” which consists of the majority of nodes. Industrial leaders, i.e., the largest companies in terms of market value, are in the highest k -shells of both networks. The nucleus of the life sciences sector is very stable: once a firm enters the nucleus, it is likely to stay there for a long time. At the same time we do not observe the above three components in the information and communication technology sector. We also conduct a systematic study of these three components in random scale-free networks. Our results suggest that the sizes of the nucleus and the tendrils in scale-free networks decrease as the exponent of the power-law degree distribution λ increases, and disappear for λ≥3 . We compare the k -shell structure of random scale-free model networks with two real-world business firm networks in the life sciences and in the information and communication technology sectors. We argue that the observed behavior of the k -shell structure in the two industries is consistent with the coexistence of both preferential and random agreements in the evolution of industrial networks.

Several decades of research in the field of machine learning have resulted in a multitude of different algorithms for solving a broad range of problems. To tackle a new application, a researcher typically tries to map their problem onto one of these existing methods, often influenced by their familiarity with specific algorithms and by the availability of corresponding software implementations. In this study, we describe an alternative methodology for applying machine learning, in which a bespoke solution is formulated for each new application. The solution is expressed through a compact modelling language, and the corresponding custom machine learning code is then generated automatically. This model-based approach offers several major advantages, including the opportunity to create highly tailored models for specific scenarios, as well as rapid prototyping and comparison of a range of alternative models. Furthermore, newcomers to the field of machine learning do not have to learn about the huge range of traditional methods, but instead can focus their attention on understanding a single modelling environment. In this study, we show how probabilistic graphical models, coupled with efficient inference algorithms, provide a very flexible foundation for model-based machine learning, and we outline a large-scale commercial application of this framework involving tens of millions of users. We also describe the concept of probabilistic programming as a powerful software environment for model-based machine learning, and we discuss a specific probabilistic programming language called Infer.NET, which has been widely used in practical applications. PMID:23277612

Several decades of research in the field of machine learning have resulted in a multitude of different algorithms for solving a broad range of problems. To tackle a new application, a researcher typically tries to map their problem onto one of these existing methods, often influenced by their familiarity with specific algorithms and by the availability of corresponding software implementations. In this study, we describe an alternative methodology for applying machine learning, in which a bespoke solution is formulated for each new application. The solution is expressed through a compact modelling language, and the corresponding custom machine learning code is then generated automatically. This model-based approach offers several major advantages, including the opportunity to create highly tailored models for specific scenarios, as well as rapid prototyping and comparison of a range of alternative models. Furthermore, newcomers to the field of machine learning do not have to learn about the huge range of traditional methods, but instead can focus their attention on understanding a single modelling environment. In this study, we show how probabilistic graphical models, coupled with efficient inference algorithms, provide a very flexible foundation for model-based machine learning, and we outline a large-scale commercial application of this framework involving tens of millions of users. We also describe the concept of probabilistic programming as a powerful software environment for model-based machine learning, and we discuss a specific probabilistic programming language called Infer.NET, which has been widely used in practical applications. PMID:23277612

Government-led pollution prevention programs tend to focus on large businesses due to their potential to pollute larger quantities, therefore leaving a gap in programs targeting small and home-basedbusinesses. In light of this gap, we set out to determine if a voluntary, peer education approach led by female, Hispanic community health workers (promotoras) can influence small and home-basedbusinesses to implement pollution prevention strategies on-site. This paper describes a partnership between promotoras from a non-profit organization and researchers from a university working together to reach these businesses in a predominately Hispanic area of Tucson, Arizona. From 2008 to 2011, the promotora-led pollution prevention program reached a total of 640 small and home-basedbusinesses. Program activities include technical trainings for promotoras and businesses, generation of culturally and language appropriate educational materials, and face-to-face peer education via multiple on-site visits. To determine the overall effectiveness of the program, surveys were used to measure best practices implemented on-site, perceptions towards pollution prevention, and overall satisfaction with the industry-specific trainings. This paper demonstrates that promotoras can promote the implementation of pollution prevention best practices by Hispanic small and home-basedbusinesses considered "hard-to-reach" by government-led programs. PMID:26371028

Government-led pollution prevention programs tend to focus on large businesses due to their potential to pollute larger quantities, therefore leaving a gap in programs targeting small and home-basedbusinesses. In light of this gap, we set out to determine if a voluntary, peer education approach led by female, Hispanic community health workers (promotoras) can influence small and home-basedbusinesses to implement pollution prevention strategies on-site. This paper describes a partnership between promotoras from a non-profit organization and researchers from a university working together to reach these businesses in a predominately Hispanic area of Tucson, Arizona. From 2008 to 2011, the promotora-led pollution prevention program reached a total of 640 small and home-basedbusinesses. Program activities include technical trainings for promotoras and businesses, generation of culturally and language appropriate educational materials, and face-to-face peer education via multiple on-site visits. To determine the overall effectiveness of the program, surveys were used to measure best practices implemented on-site, perceptions towards pollution prevention, and overall satisfaction with the industry-specific trainings. This paper demonstrates that promotoras can promote the implementation of pollution prevention best practices by Hispanic small and home-basedbusinesses considered “hard-to-reach” by government-led programs. PMID:26371028

This paper describes a dynamic computer-basedbusiness learning environment and the results from applying it in a real-world business organization. We argue for using learning tools, which not only provide realistic and complex models of reality, but are also are authentic, facilitate continuous problem solving and meaningful learning, and embed…

Educating business students for ethical professional practice is a growing concern for both the corporate world and business education. Highly publicised scandals have pushed public trust in business to an all-time low, resulting in losses of customers and high employee turnover. Corporate and business education leaders have begun to press for…

The difficulty in aligning business strategies with the design of enterprise systems has been recognised as a major inhibitor of successful IT initiatives. Service-oriented architecture (SOA) initiatives imply an entirely new approach to enterprise process enablement and require significant architectural redesign. Successful SOA deployments are highly dependent on the degree to which flexible support for evolving business strategies is embedded into their designs. This chapter addresses the challenge of modellingbusiness strategies in support of SOA designs. The proposed framework is derived from conceptual elements introduced in the OMG business motivation model and delivers an architectural view for business stakeholders in a computational-independent model (CIM). This model represents the first of three layers that will define a complete reference architecture for a service-based computing model.

Two-dimensional (2D) maps and cross-sections, and 3D conceptual models, are fundamental tools for understanding, communicating and modeling geology. Yet geologists lack dedicated and intuitive tools that allow rapid creation of such figures and models. Standard drawing packages produce only 2D figures that are not suitable for quantitative analysis. Geologic modeling packages can produce 3D models and are widely used in the groundwater and petroleum communities, but are often slow and non-intuitive to use, requiring the creation of a grid early in the modeling workflow and the use of geostatistical methods to populate the grid blocks with geologic information. We present an alternative approach to rapidly create figures and models using sketch-based interface and modelling (SBIM). We leverage methods widely adopted in other industries to prototype complex geometries and designs. The SBIM tool contains built-in geologic rules that constrain how sketched lines and surfaces interact. These rules are based on the logic of superposition and cross-cutting relationships that follow from rock-forming processes, including deposition, deformation, intrusion and modification by diagenesis or metamorphism. The approach allows rapid creation of multiple, geologically realistic, figures and models in 2D and 3D using a simple, intuitive interface. The user can sketch in plan- or cross-section view. Geologic rules are used to extrapolate sketched lines in real time to create 3D surfaces. Quantitative analysis can be carried our directly on the models. Alternatively, they can be output as simple figures or imported directly into other modeling tools. The software runs on a tablet PC and can be used in a variety of settings including the office, classroom and field. The speed and ease of use of SBIM enables multiple interpretations to be developed from limited data, uncertainty to be readily appraised, and figures and models to be rapidly updated to incorporate new data or concepts.

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore how owner-managers of small businesses can learn in peer networks to improve their management skills. It aims to offer a new way of understanding owner-managers' learning as part of a social process, by highlighting the complex, interactive relationship that exists between the owner-manager, his or…

To understand students' choice behavior of taking on-line international business courses, a survey study is conducted to collect information regarding students' actual choices of taking on-line courses and potential factors that may have impacts on students' choices of online learning. Potential factors such as enrollment status, demographic…

One issue in undergraduate business education remaining underexamined is student absenteeism. In this article, the literature on undergraduate absenteeism is reviewed culminating in a proposed conceptual framework to guide future research, and an exploratory investigation of management students' attitudes about absenteeism is conducted.…

Designed to help community and junior colleges in Texas establish their own approach to economic development services, this report reviews innovative programs providing assistance to business and industry in many parts of the United States. After chapter I discusses the changing role of community and junior colleges in economic development…

This guide for instruction in the basics of entrepreneurship is intended for use in adult education programs, and secondary and postsecondary business education programs. It can be used as integrative material for all vocational-technical programs as well, since it provides a beginning point for those who are interested in self-employment and for…

In today's software market, much effort is being expended on the development of data base management systems (DBMS). Most commercially available DBMS were designed for business use. However, the need for such systems within the engineering and scientific communities is becoming apparent. A potential DBMS application that appears attractive is the handling of data for finite element engineering models. The applications of a commercially available, business-oriented DBMS to a structural engineering, finite element model is explored. The model, DBMS, an approach to using the DBMS, advantages and disadvantages are described. Plans for research on a scientific and engineering DBMS are discussed.

Agent-basedmodeling and simulation (ABMS) is a new approach to modeling systems comprised of interacting autonomous agents. ABMS promises to have far-reaching effects on the way that businesses use computers to support decision-making and researchers use electronic laboratories to do research. Some have gone so far as to contend that ABMS is a new way of doing science. Computational advances make possible a growing number of agent-based applications across many fields. Applications range from modeling agent behavior in the stock market and supply chains, to predicting the spread of epidemics and the threat of bio-warfare, from modeling the growth and decline of ancient civilizations to modeling the complexities of the human immune system, and many more. This tutorial describes the foundations of ABMS, identifies ABMS toolkits and development methods illustrated through a supply chain example, and provides thoughts on the appropriate contexts for ABMS versus conventional modeling techniques.

This chapter presents a case study where Problem Based Learning (PBL) approach is applied to a Web-based environment. It first describes the main features behind the PBL for creating Business Engineers able to face the grand technological challenges of the 2020. Then it introduces a Web Based system supporting the PBL strategy, called the “Virtual eBMS”. This system has been designed and implemented at the e-Business Management Section of the Scuola Superiore ISUFI - University of Salento (Italy), in the framework of a research project carried out in collaboration with IBM. Besides the logical and technological description of Virtual eBMS, the chapter presents two applications of the platform in two different contexts: an academic context (international master) and an entrepreneurial context (awareness workshop with companies and entrepreneurs). The system is illustrated starting from the description of an operational framework for designing curricula PBL based from the author perspective and, then, illustrating a typical scenario of a learner accessing to the curricula. In the description, it is highlighted both the “structured” way and the “unstructured” way to create and follow an entire learning path.

This curriculum guide is intended for vocational agriculture teachers who deliver agricultural business and management programs at the secondary or postsecondary level. It is based on the Arizona validated occupational competencies and tasks for management and supervisory positions in agricultural business. The competency/skill and task list…

This curriculum guide is designed for Arkansas ninth-grade students to explore business careers through the use of competency-based instructional materials. Exploratory business teachers are asked to incorporate the twenty-three units of study into a sequence best suited to their teaching style. Units include such topics as "Social Security,""What…

With the uptake of business process modelling in practice, the demand grows for guidelines that lead to consistent and integrated collections of process models. The notion of a business process architecture has been explicitly proposed to address this. This paper provides an overview of the prevailing approaches to design a business process architecture. Furthermore, it includes evaluations of the usability and use of the identified approaches. Finally, it presents a framework for business process architecture design that can be used to develop a concrete architecture. The use and usability were evaluated in two ways. First, a survey was conducted among 39 practitioners, in which the opinion of the practitioners on the use and usefulness of the approaches was evaluated. Second, four case studies were conducted, in which process architectures from practice were analysed to determine the approaches or elements of approaches that were used in their design. Both evaluations showed that practitioners have a preference for using approaches that are based on reference models and approaches that are based on the identification of business functions or business objects. At the same time, the evaluations showed that practitioners use these approaches in combination, rather than selecting a single approach.

Physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PB-PK) models attempt to provide both a realistic anatomic description of the animal to which a drug or toxic chemical has been administered and a biologically accurate representation of the physiological pathways for chemical storage, metab...

Contends e-business is particularly the domain of college and university business officers, with today's officers facing an unprecedented opportunity to exercise a critical leadership role in the deployment of advanced information technology solutions on campus. Describes relevant issues and advances, and presents ten initiatives that business…

This book introduces key issues in program planning as practiced in business and educational settings. Two chapters in part 1 introduce two foundational models--Lifelong Education Program Planning (LEPP) model and Contingency-Based Program Planning--and provide background on models designed by Houle, Knowles, Boyle, and Nadler. Parts 2-5 focus on…

Territorial user rights for fisheries are being promoted to enhance the sustainability of small-scale fisheries. Using Chile as a case study, we designed a market-based program aimed at improving fishers' livelihoods while incentivizing the establishment and enforcement of no-take areas within areas managed with territorial user right regimes. Building on explicit enabling conditions (i.e., high levels of governance, participation, and empowerment), we used a place-based, human-centered approach to design a program that will have the necessary support and buy-in from local fishers to result in landscape-scale biodiversity benefits. Transactional infrastructure must be complex enough to capture the biodiversity benefits being created, but simple enough so that the program can be scaled up and is attractive to potential financiers. Biodiversity benefits created must be commoditized, and desired behavioral changes must be verified within a transactional context. Demand must be generated for fisher-created biodiversity benefits in order to attract financing and to scale the market model. Important design decisions around these 3 components-supply, transactional infrastructure, and demand-must be made based on local social-ecological conditions. Our market model, which is being piloted in Chile, is a flexible foundation on which to base scalable opportunities to operationalize a scheme that incentivizes local, verifiable biodiversity benefits via conservation behaviors by fishers that could likely result in significant marine conservation gains and novel cross-sector alliances. PMID:25737027

In a recent work, we introduced two models for the dynamics of customers trying to find the business that best corresponds to their expectation for the price of a commodity. In agreement with the empirical data, a power-law distribution for the business sizes was obtained, taking the number of customers of a business as a proxy for its size. Here, we extend one of our previous models in two different ways. First, we introduce a business aggregation rate that is fitness dependent, which allows us to reproduce a spread in empirical data from one country to another. Second, we allow the bankruptcy rate to take a different functional form, to be able to obtain a log-normal distribution with power-law tails for the size of the businesses.

In the present paper, we investigate the chaotic implications of a seven-equation model of the business cycle. The main distinguishing features of the model are related to: (a) the role played by the bargaining power in the process of income redistribution; (b) the consideration of hysteresis effects on workers’ consumption demand; (c) the effect of public expenditure on labor productivity. In addition, the role played by the agents’ memory on the actual dynamics of the economic system, with particular regard to their learning-by-doing process, is particularly emphasized. Under all these assumptions, the system exhibits a rich and complex phenomenology, characterized by a number of transitions to chaos (in particular via sequences of period doubling bifurcations), aperiodic behavior, bistability, tristability, etc. We maintain that our analysis takes us another step forward in the building of a more general model of the business cycle. In particular, the model we propose may be of help in the explanation of some peculiar features of advanced capitalist economies, with particular regard to the role played by the State in the determination of agents’ disposable income, to the debt dynamics of the various macroagents, and to the main dilemmas of economic policy. More in general, the main lesson one learns from our investigation is that “disequilibrium paths”, characterized by “complicated” dynamics which, more often than not, takes the form of aperiodic motion, should be considered as the “normal” state of the system.

Moving beyond decades of mutual distrust and animosity, corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are learning to cooperate with each other. Realizing that their interests are converging, the two sides are working together to create innovative businessmodels that are helping to grow new markets and accelerate the eradication of poverty. The path to convergence has proceeded in three stages. In the initial be-responsible stage, companies and NGOs, realizing that they had to coexist, started to look for ways to influence each other through joint social responsibility projects. This experience paved the way for the get-into-business stage, in which NGOs and companies sought to serve the poor by setting up successful businesses. In the process, NGOs learned business discipline from the private sector, while corporations gained an appreciation for the local knowledge, low-cost businessmodels, and community-based marketing techniques that the NGOs have mastered. Increased success on both sides has laid the foundation for the cocreate-business stage, in which companies and NGOs become key parts of each other's capacity to deliver value. When BP sought to market a duel-fuel portable stove in India, it set up one such cocreation system with three Indian NGOs. The system allowed BP to bring the innovative stove to a geographically dispersed market through myriad local distributors without incurring distribution costs so high that the product would become unaffordable. The company sold its stoves profitably, the NGOs gained access to a lucrative revenue stream that could fund other projects, and consumers got more than the ability to sit down to a hot meal-they got the opportunity to earn incomes as the local distributors and thus to gain economic and social influence. PMID:17345682

The extension of optical projection lithography through immersion to patterning features with half pitch <=65 nm is placing greater demands on the mask. Strong resolution enhancement techniques (RETs), such as embedded and alternating phase shift masks and complex model-based optical proximity correction, are required to compensate for diffraction and limited depth of focus (DOF). To fabricate these masks, many new or upgraded tools are required to write patterns, measure feature sizes and placement, inspect for defects, review defect printability and repair defects on these masks. Beyond the significant technical challenges, suppliers of mask fabrication equipment face the challenge of being profitable in the small market for mask equipment while encountering significant R&D expenses to bring new generations of mask fabrication equipment to market. The total available market for patterned masks is estimated to be $2.5B to $2.9B per year. The patterned mask market is about 20% of the market size for lithography equipment and materials. The total available market for mask-making equipment is estimated to be about $800M per year. The largest R&D affordability issue arises for the makers of equipment for fabricating masks where total available sales are typically less than ten units per year. SEMATECH has used discounted cash flow models to predict the affordable R&D while maintaining industry accepted internal rates of return. The results have been compared to estimates of the total R&D cost to bring a new generation of mask equipment to market for various types of tools. The analysis revealed that affordability of the required R&D is a significant problem for many suppliers of mask-making equipment. Consortia such as SEMATECH and Selete have played an important role in cost sharing selected mask equipment and material development projects. Governments in the United States, in Europe and in Japan have also helped equipment suppliers with support for R&D. This paper

A model-based approach to estimating wall positions for a building is developed and tested using simulated data. It borrows two techniques from geophysical inversion problems, layer stripping and stacking, and combines them with a model-based estimation algorithm that minimizes the mean-square error between the predicted signal and the data. The technique is designed to process multiple looks from an ultra wideband radar array. The processed signal is time-gated and each section processed to detect the presence of a wall and estimate its position, thickness, and material parameters. The floor plan of a building is determined by moving the array around the outside of the building. In this paper we describe how the stacking and layer stripping algorithms are combined and show the results from a simple numerical example of three parallel walls.

Sandia National Laboratories performs systems analysis of high risk, high consequence systems. In particular, Sandia is responsible for the engineering of nuclear weapons, exclusive of the explosive physics package. In meeting this responsibility, Sandia has developed fundamental approaches to safety and a process for evaluating safety based on modeling and simulation. These approaches provide confidence in the safety of our nuclear weapons. Similar concepts may be applied to improve the safety of other high consequence systems.

This article discusses a simulation wherein learners of Japanese as a Foreign Language (JFL) in a business writing course at an American university are assigned tasks to write a series of business letters based on situations that are likely to occur in actual business settings. After an overview of the theoretical background, this article…

The Real Business Language Challenge was a collaborative pilot project between Coca-Cola Enterprises (CCE) and Routes into Languages East for Year 9 and 10 pupils. It was based on CCE's award-winning Real Business Challenge, part of its highly acclaimed education programme. The Real Business Language Challenge transformed the project into a…

From September 2009 onwards, a new business curriculum which focuses on three key business disciplines, namely management, accounting and finance, has been implemented in Hong Kong senior secondary schools. A new assessment guide has been also proposed in light of the new curriculum. Such business curriculum and assessment reform move in the…

A competency-based degree program in human resource management was co-generated by six groups of stakeholders who synthesized competency models using group decision support software. The program focuses on core human resource processes, general business management, strategic decision making and problem solving, change management, and personal…

The authors describe a simulation program based on a workshop approach designed for postsecondary business students. Features and benefits of the workshop technique are discussed. The authors cover practical aspects of designing and implementing simulation workshops. (CH)

This research combines corpus-based and intuition-based approaches in developing a list of important words in business news that Thai learners of business English need to know. The Thai corpus of English for Business and Economic News (Thai-EBEN) has been compiled from English business news articles in the Thai press. A computer concordancing…

This study explored how market forces might affect the business aspects of orthodontic practices; in particular, profitability. The forces identified were (1) intensity of rivalry, (2) threat of new entrants, and (3) bargaining power of buyers and suppliers. A mail survey instrument was used to collect the data. Results showed that more than half the surveyed practices show an increase in new case starts despite weak economic conditions. Although satellite offices and marketing increase the overhead, they do not add to net profit. New entrants are a threat to existing practices, as are the substitute discretionary spending by the consumer. Interestingly, while some orthodontic practices have joined the managed care programs, a majority of them realize neither increased patient load nor profit. Our data seem to indicate that orthodontic practices have not been successful in "cost containment" with their marketing, number of employees, computerization or inventory. Collectively, the results of this study suggest that success in an orthodontic office is primarily dependent on the practitioner's personality traits, rather than rigidly applied business principles. PMID:8876492

Web-based photo albums that support organizing and viewing the users' images are widely used. These services provide a convenient solution for storing, editing and sharing images. In many cases, the users attach geotags to the images in order to enable using them e.g. in location based applications on social networks. Our paper discusses a procedure that collects open access images from a site frequently visited by tourists. Geotagged pictures showing the image of a sight or tourist attraction are selected and processed in photogrammetric processing software that produces the 3D model of the captured object. For the particular investigation we selected three attractions in Budapest. To assess the geometrical accuracy, we used laser scanner and DSLR as well as smart phone photography to derive reference values to enable verifying the spatial model obtained from the web-album images. The investigation shows how detailed and accurate models could be derived applying photogrammetric processing software, simply by using images of the community, without visiting the site.

The recent progress of Business Process Management (BPM) is reflected by the figures of the related industry. Wintergreen Research estimates that the international market for BPM-related software and services accounted for more than USD 1 billion in 2005 with a tendency towards rapid growth in the subsequent couple of years [457]. The relevance of business process modeling to general management initiatives has been previously studied in the 1990s [28]. Today, Gartner finds that organizations that had the best results in implementing business process management spent more than 40 percent of the total project time on discovery and construction of their initial process model [265]. As a consequence, Gartner considers Business Process Modeling to be among the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008.

Orseau and Ring, as well as Dewey, have recently described problems, including self-delusion, with the behavior of agents using various definitions of utility functions. An agent's utility function is defined in terms of the agent's history of interactions with its environment. This paper argues, via two examples, that the behavior problems can be avoided by formulating the utility function in two steps: 1) inferring a model of the environment from interactions, and 2) computing utility as a function of the environment model. Basing a utility function on a model that the agent must learn implies that the utility function must initially be expressed in terms of specifications to be matched to structures in the learned model. These specifications constitute prior assumptions about the environment so this approach will not work with arbitrary environments. But the approach should work for agents designed by humans to act in the physical world. The paper also addresses the issue of self-modifying agents and shows that if provided with the possibility to modify their utility functions agents will not choose to do so, under some usual assumptions.

This case study briefly explores how an online, multimedia learning module based on a Cognitive Apprenticeship higher level pedagogy can positively affect students achieving the learning outcomes of a Constructivist project-based curriculum in a blended e-business management program in the Middle East. The cohort in this program is nonnative…

To determine why something has stopped working, its useful to know how it was supposed to work in the first place. That simple observation underlies some of the considerable interest generated in recent years on the topic of model-based reasoning, particularly its application to diagnosis and troubleshooting. This paper surveys the current state of the art, reviewing areas that are well understood and exploring areas that present challenging research topics. It views the fundamental paradigm as the interaction of prediction and observation, and explores it by examining three fundamental subproblems: generating hypotheses by reasoning from a symptom to a collection of components whose misbehavior may plausibly have caused that symptom; testing each hypothesis to see whether it can account for all available observations of device behavior; then discriminating among the ones that survive testing. We analyze each of these independently at the knowledge level i.e., attempting to understand what reasoning capabilities arise from the different varieties of knowledge available to the program. We find that while a wide range of apparently diverse model-based systems have been built for diagnosis and troubleshooting, they are for the most part variations on the central theme outlined here. Their diversity lies primarily in the varying amounts of kinds of knowledge they bring to bear at each stage of the process; the underlying paradigm is fundamentally the same.

An important problem faced by auditors is gauging how much reliance can be placed on the accounting systems that process millions of transactions to produce the numbers summarized in a company`s financial statements. Accounting systems contain internal controls, procedures designed to detect and correct errors and irregularities that may occur in the processing of transactions. In a complex accounting system, it can be an extremely difficult task for the auditor to anticipate the possible errors that can occur and to evaluate the effectiveness of the controls at detecting them. An accurate analysis must take into account the unique features of each company`s business processes. To cope with this complexity and variability, the Comet system applies a model-based reasoning approach to the analysis of accounting systems and their controls. An auditor uses Comet to create a hierarchical flowchart model that describes the intended processing of business transactions by an accounting system and the operation of its controls. Comet uses the constructed model to automatically analyze the effectiveness of the controls in detecting potential errors. Price Waterhouse auditors have used Comet on a variety of real audits in several countries around the world.

Rainfall is one of the most important events of human life and society. Some rainfall phenomena like floods or hailstone are a threat to the agriculture, business and even life. However in the meteorological observatories there are methods to detect and alarm about this kind of events, nowadays the prediction techniques based on synoptic measurements need to be improved to achieve medium term feasible forecasts. Any deviation in the measurements or in the model description makes the forecast to diverge in time from the real atmosphere evolution. In this paper the advances in a local rainfall forecasting system based on time series estimation with General Regression Neural Networks are presented. The system is introduced, explaining the measurements, methodology and the current state of the development. The aim of the work is to provide a complementary criteria to the current forecast systems, based on the daily atmosphere observation and tracking over a certain place.

This article describes the increasing role of business in sponsoring Grand Awards for the top high school science students in each of 13 disciplines of the International Science and Engineering Fair. Phillips Petroleum Company and other businesses sponsor the student science awards to recognize gifted and talented students and to motivate other…

This article presents an interview with John D. Musso, executive director of the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) International. Musso talks about trends and issues that will most affect school business and operations in 2007 and beyond. Despite the challenges facing school operations, he believes that the key to being successful at…

Business processes need to be aligned with business strategies. This paper elaborates on experiences from a business process design effort in an action research project performed at Intersport Sweden. The purpose with this project was to create a solid base for taking the retail chain Intersport into a new organizational state where the new process design is aligned with strategic goals. Although business process modeling is concerned with creating artifacts, traditionally information systems design science research has had little impact on research on business process models. In this paper, we address the question of how design science research can contribute to business process design. Three heuristic guidelines for creating organizational commitment and strategic alignment in process design are presented. The guidelines are derived from the successful actions taken in the research project. The development of these guidelines is used as a basis to reflect upon the contribution of design science research to business process design.

Within a span of over a decade, India has become one of the most favored destinations across the world for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) operations. India has rapidly achieved the status of being the most preferred destination for BPO for companies located in the US and Europe. Security and privacy are the two major issues needed to be addressed by the Indian software industry to have an increased and long-term outsourcing contract from the US. Another important issue is about sharing employee’s information to ensure that data and vital information of an outsourcing company is secured and protected. To ensure that the confidentiality of a client’s information is maintained, BPOs need to implement some data security measures. In this paper, we propose a new protocol for specifically for BPO Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMC). As there are many computations and surveys which involve confidential data from many parties or organizations and the concerned data is property of the organization, preservation and security of this data is of prime importance for such type of computations. Although the computation requires data from all the parties, but none of the associated parties would want to reveal their data to the other parties. We have proposed a new efficient and scalable protocol to perform computation on encrypted information. The information is encrypted in a manner that it does not affect the result of the computation. It uses modifier tokens which are distributed among virtual parties, and finally used in the computation. The computation function uses the acquired data and modifier tokens to compute right result from the encrypted data. Thus without revealing the data, right result can be computed and privacy of the parties is maintained. We have given a probabilistic security analysis of hacking the protocol and shown how zero hacking security can be achieved. Also we have analyzed the specific case of Indian BPO.

Agent-basedmodeling and simulation (ABMS) is a new approach to modeling systems comprised of autonomous, interacting agents. ABMS promises to have far-reaching effects on the way that businesses use computers to support decision-making and researchers use electronic laboratories to support their research. Some have gone so far as to contend that ABMS 'is a third way of doing science,' in addition to traditional deductive and inductive reasoning (Axelrod 1997b). Computational advances have made possible a growing number of agent-basedmodels across a variety of application domains. Applications range from modeling agent behavior in the stock market, supply chains, and consumer markets, to predicting the spread of epidemics, the threat of bio-warfare, and the factors responsible for the fall of ancient civilizations. This tutorial describes the theoretical and practical foundations of ABMS, identifies toolkits and methods for developing agent models, and illustrates the development of a simple agent-basedmodel of shopper behavior using spreadsheets.

Eventually, distributed PV will become a more significant part of the generation mix. When this happens, it is expected that utilities will have to take on a more active role in the placement, operation and control of these systems. There are operational complexities and concerns of revenue erosion that will drive utilities into greater involvement of distributed PV and will create new businessmodels. This report summarizes work done by Navigant Consulting Inc. for the National Renewable Energy Laboratory as part of the Department of Energy's work on Renewable System Integration. The objective of the work was to better understand the structure of these future businessmodels and the research, development and demonstration (RD&D) required to support their deployment. This report describes potential future PV businessmodels in terms of combinations of utility ownership and control of the PV assets, and the various relationships between end-users and third-party owners.

Robots and remote systems will play crucial roles in future decontamination and decommissioning (D&D) of nuclear facilities. Many of these facilities, such as uranium enrichment plants, weapons assembly plants, research and production reactors, and fuel recycling facilities, are dormant; there is also an increasing number of commercial reactors whose useful lifetime is nearly over. To reduce worker exposure to radiation, occupational and other hazards associated with D&D tasks, robots will execute much of the work agenda. Traditional teleoperated systems rely on human understanding (based on information gathered by remote viewing cameras) of the work environment to safely control the remote equipment. However, removing the operator from the work site substantially reduces his efficiency and effectiveness. To approach the productivity of a human worker, tasks will be performed telerobotically, in which many aspects of task execution are delegated to robot controllers and other software. This paper describes a system that semi-automatically builds a virtual world for remote D&D operations by constructing 3-D models of a robot`s work environment. Planar and quadric surface representations of objects typically found in nuclear facilities are generated from laser rangefinder data with a minimum of human interaction. The surface representations are then incorporated into a task space model that can be viewed and analyzed by the operator, accessed by motion planning and robot safeguarding algorithms, and ultimately used by the operator to instruct the robot at a level much higher than teleoperation.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) was developed, among other reasons, to hold healthcare providers accountable for the privacy of patient's personal and medical information. It includes language addressing the need for ``reasonable safeguards'' for speech privacy and oral communication in a healthcare setting. After 50 years of development, speech privacy science and mechanisms are well understood. However, current specifications cannot be directly applied and are not specifically written to address the application of the current acoustical knowledgebase to the health care industry's need for compliance. This is a discussion of the state of existing privacy technology and specifications; the ability and availability of mechanisms currently in the health care industry as a possible route for implementation of the regulation; the state of development of specification to address specifically the industry's needs; and a potential businessmodel for implementation.

Large chemical and biological systems such as fuel cells, ion channels, molecular motors, and viruses are of great importance to the scientific community and public health. Typically, these complex systems in conjunction with their aquatic environment pose a fabulous challenge to theoretical description, simulation, and prediction. In this work, we propose a differential geometry based multiscale paradigm to model complex macromolecular systems, and to put macroscopic and microscopic descriptions on an equal footing. In our approach, the differential geometry theory of surfaces and geometric measure theory are employed as a natural means to couple the macroscopic continuum mechanical description of the aquatic environment with the microscopic discrete atom-istic description of the macromolecule. Multiscale free energy functionals, or multiscale action functionals are constructed as a unified framework to derive the governing equations for the dynamics of different scales and different descriptions. Two types of aqueous macromolecular complexes, ones that are near equilibrium and others that are far from equilibrium, are considered in our formulations. We show that generalized Navier–Stokes equations for the fluid dynamics, generalized Poisson equations or generalized Poisson–Boltzmann equations for electrostatic interactions, and Newton's equation for the molecular dynamics can be derived by the least action principle. These equations are coupled through the continuum-discrete interface whose dynamics is governed by potential driven geometric flows. Comparison is given to classical descriptions of the fluid and electrostatic interactions without geometric flow based micro-macro interfaces. The detailed balance of forces is emphasized in the present work. We further extend the proposed multiscale paradigm to micro-macro analysis of electrohydrodynamics, electrophoresis, fuel cells, and ion channels. We derive generalized Poisson–Nernst–Planck equations that

Competency-based instruction can be applied to a military setting, an academic program, or a corporate environment with a focus on producing performance-based learning outcomes. In this article, the authors provide theoretical and practical information about underlying characteristics of competencies and explain how the Department of Instructional…

For managers in large, well-established businesses, the Internet is a tough nut to crack. It is very simple to set up a Web presence and very difficult to create a Web-basedbusinessmodel. Established businesses that over decades have carefully built brands and physical distribution relationships risk damaging all they have created when they pursue commerce through the Net. Still, managers can't avoid the impact of electronic commerce on their businesses. They need to understand the opportunities available to them and recognize how their companies may be vulnerable if rivals seize those opportunities first. Broadly speaking, the Internet presents four distinct types of opportunities. First, it links companies directly to customers, suppliers, and other interested parties. Second, it lets companies bypass other players in an industry's value chain. Third, it is a tool for developing and delivering new products and services to new customers. Fourth, it will enable certain companies to dominate the electronic channel of an entire industry or segment, control access to customers, and set business rules. As he elaborates on these four points, the author gives established companies a systematic way to sort through the risks and rewards of doing business in cyberspace. PMID:10177862

By applying multilevel models with random effects, the authors reviewed and synthesized findings from 30 studies that were published in the last 20 years exploring the relationship between the Educational Testing Service Major Field Test for a Bachelor's Degree in Business (MFTB) and related factors. The results suggest that MFTB scores correlated…

In Robins and Delisi (2008), a linear decay model, a new IGE model by Sarpkaya (2006), and a series of APA-Basedmodels were scored using data from three airports. This report is a guide to the APA-basedmodels.

Analysis of 410 business communication articles by 585 authors revealed that English, management, and business education teachers wrote the most articles; associate professors published 32 percent, full professors 23 percent, and assistant professors 18 percent; and Arizona State University teachers ranked in the top 3 institutions for 5 of the 6…

Business English education concern is of great significance. Business English for International Trade in Guangdong University of Foreign Studies (GDUFS) is widely acclaimed, and it is also a popular major. GDUFS has adopted the slogan "Learn from East and West, moral integrity and direct behavior". It is a famous cradle of learning,…

Discusses how Washington University (St. Louis, MO) converted odd space into a program allowing students to be shopkeepers for necessary services and the school assuming the role of landlord. Tips for overseeing student businesses are highlighted. (GR)

Discusses results from a survey of graduates following a module in e-business and e-commerce at the University of Sheffield that suggest differences in prior knowledge and cultural background impact students' acquisition of domain knowledge and intellectual and information research skills. Considers implications for Web-based instruction.…

The purpose of this report is to help in the evolution of these systems by examining the measures used, including, but not limited to, tests. The author asks: Are these the best measures? Are they used right? Are there other measures that should be employed? It is the model of reform itself that is examined, and the report does not address…

To assure sustainability of our health systems and improve quality, implementing integrated wellness, health and social care service models have been proposed. They will need the enabling power of Health ICT facilitated systems and applications. Such solutions support the efficient coordination of service provision across provider and jurisdictional boundaries, the sharing of data, information and knowledge, and the streamlining as well as individualisation of care. Achieving such change in health systems with limited resources requires refocusing the trend of medico-technical progress. Health ICT innovations must be scrutinised for their potential to indeed contribute not only to decreasing costs, but - at the same time - improving the quality of life and ability to cope with challenges like the increasing prevalence of certain chronic diseases or new expectations from healthy people and patients alike. This paper argues that decision-oriented governance models leading to focused policy interventions are needed at several levels: Governments should provide for comprehensive Health ICT infrastructures to enable provider market success. At the individual actor level, sustainable businessmodels reflecting in their value propositions the expectations of their clients (patients and funders) need to be developed. Health policy should design intelligent reimbursement systems providing incentives to indeed optimise services. Smart health innovations should only be implemented where they help achieve the goal of increasing the productivity of health value chains and the quality of overall service delivery value systems. To assure allocational efficiency, regulatory impact analyses (RIA) can support evidence based policy making. PMID:22727880

Although literature about problem based learning (PBL) is not scarce, there is little research on experiences about learning methodologies that combine PBL and the use of simulation tools. This lack of studies is even more notable in the case of engineering courses. The motivation for this study is to show how such a combination of PBL and…

Team-based learning (TBL) was applied within a third-year unit of study about ethics and management with the aim of enhancing students' teamwork skills. A survey used to collect students' opinions about their experience with TBL provided insights about how TBL helped students to develop an appreciation for teamwork and team collaboration. The team…

With the advent of XML-based SOA, WS-BPEL shortly turned out to become a widely accepted standard for modelingbusiness processes. Though SOA is said to embrace the principle of business agility, BPEL process definitions are still manually crafted into their final executable version. While SOA has proven to be a giant leap forward in building flexible IT systems, this static BPEL workflow model is somewhat paradoxical to the need for real business agility and should be enhanced to better sustain continual process evolution. In this paper, we point out the potential of adding business intelligence with respect to business process re-engineering patterns to the system to allow for automatic business process optimization. Furthermore, we point out that BPR macro-rules could be implemented leveraging micro-techniques from computer science. We present some practical examples that illustrate the benefit of such adaptive process models and our preliminary findings.

With the health care environment shifting to a value-based payment system, Catholic Health Initiatives nursing leadership spearheaded an initiative with 14 hospitals to establish best nursing care at a lower cost. The implementation of technology-enabled business processes at point of care led to a new model for best value nursing care: Value-Based Resource Management. The new model integrates clinical patient data from the electronic medical record and embeds the new information in care team workflows for actionable real-time decision support and predictive forecasting. The participating hospitals reported increased patient satisfaction and cost savings in the reduction of overtime and improvement in length of stay management. New data generated by the initiative on nursing hours and cost by patient and by population (Medicare severity diagnosis-related groups), and patient health status outcomes across the acute care continuum expanded business intelligence for a value-based population health system. PMID:23454987

We establish a generalization of Kitaev modelsbased on unitary quantum groupoids. In particular, when inputting a Kitaev-Kong quantum groupoid H{sub C}, we show that the ground state manifold of the generalized model is canonically isomorphic to that of the Levin-Wen modelbased on a unitary fusion category C. Therefore, the generalized Kitaev models provide realizations of the target space of the Turaev-Viro topological quantum field theory based on C.

Hospitals are encountering a new type of HMO--the risk-based, risk-sharing capitated HMO. This new HMO arrangement redefines the role of the hospital, the physicians, and the HMO plan involved. Instead of placing the HMO at risk, the hospital and physicians are now financially responsible for services covered under the HMO plan. The capitated HMO is reduced to a third-party payer, serving as a broker between subscribers and providers. In this first of two articles on capitated HMOs, the risk-based, risk-sharing capitated HMO and its relationship to hospitals and physicians is defined. The second article will take this definition and apply it to managing, monitoring, and reporting on these types of programs from an accounting perspective. PMID:10277301

Fear-based public health campaigns have been the subject of an intense moral and empirical debate. We examined how New York City, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, used fear-based appeals to confront three challenges to public health: high rates of tobacco use, obesity, and HIV infection. New York City's use of this type of messaging may have set a precedent. Other state and local health departments will have to navigate how and whether to use fear in a context where it is possible to assert that it can serve the interests of public health. But this will not reduce the need to carefully balance efficacy, uncertainty, stigma, marginalization, emotional burdens, justice, community participation, and scientific credibility. PMID:25941287

Student retention in higher education is a major issue as academic institutions compete for fewer students and face declining enrollments. A conceptual model of applying the quality improvement methodology of Six Sigma to the problem of undergraduate student retention in a college of business is presented. Improvement techniques such as cause and…

Cell culture is a technique that requires vigilance from the researcher. Common cell culture problems, including contamination with microorganisms or cells from other cultures, can place the reliability and reproducibility of cell culture work at risk. Here we use survey data, contributed by research scientists based in Australia and New Zealand, to assess common cell culture risks and how these risks are managed in practice. Respondents show that sharing of cell lines between laboratories continues to be widespread. Arrangements for mycoplasma and authentication testing are increasingly in place, although scientists are often uncertain how to perform authentication testing. Additional risks are identified for preparation of frozen stocks, storage and shipping. PMID:26365214

Business is recognizing that the associate degree is a necessity in high technology fields. Innovative practices link businesses with community colleges, allowing apprentices to gain basic job skills and a higher education. A research study explored three industries and their relationship with community colleges: automotive, construction, and…

This project was begun to explore the feasibility of instituting a personnel exchange program for vocational education--at both the secondary and postsecondary levels--and business and industry in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Following a literature search for other programs and interviews with representatives of business and industry and of…

Application of the strategic leverage of Resource Based View of the Firm (RBV) directly advocates that a company's competitive advantage is derived from its ability to assemble and exploit an appropriate combination of resources (both tangible and intangible assets). The three companies that were selected were Pittsburgh-based companies that were within relatively easy access, representing healthcare service-related industries, and can be reviewed for the principles of the RBV. The particular firms represented a variety of establishments and included Baptist Homes (a long-term care facility), University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)(a provider of hospital and other health services), and GlaxoSmithKline, Consumer Healthcare, North America (GSK-CHNA)(a global provider of healthcare products and services). Through the case studies, it was found that not all intangible assets are strategic, and by extension, not all measures of reputation are strategic either. For an intangible asset to be considered strategic, in this case reputation, it must be valuable, rare, imperfectly imitable, and non-substitutable. PMID:19064477

The World Wide Web technology, supported on Internet, is transforming all business activities into information-based activities. As a result, one can see a radical change in the traditional theoretical models and organisation. The small and medium enterprises (SME) are the type of enterprises that can reap more advantages with the usage of Internet for electronic business. We found that current methodologies present gaps which make them inadequate and unable to help the small and medium enterprises define an effective strategy and follow an plausible implementation path. This being so, we propose a methodology to support the complete implementation lifecycle of electronic business in small and medium enterprises.

This article describes the journey of managing the change from seven separate health providing units to one overall team providing a range of services. To facilitate the change the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award self-assessment model was used. The benefits and limitations of the model are described as are the activities undertaken to achieve a goal of delivering quality care within a customer driven rather than service driven focus. Finally the learning gained from the change is shared in an attempt to help others undertaking a similar journey. PMID:10346312

In the past few decades, as a result of the rapid developments in computational software and hardware, alternative computer aided pattern recognition approaches have been introduced to modelling many engineering problems, including constitutive modelling of materials. The main idea behind pattern recognition systems is that they learn adaptively from experience and extract various discriminants, each appropriate for its purpose. In this work an approach is presented for developing material models for soils based on evolutionary polynomial regression (EPR). EPR is a recently developed hybrid data mining technique that searches for structured mathematical equations (representing the behaviour of a system) using genetic algorithm and the least squares method. Stress-strain data from triaxial tests are used to train and develop EPR-based material models for soil. The developed models are compared with some of the well-known conventional material models and it is shown that EPR-basedmodels can provide a better prediction for the behaviour of soils. The main benefits of using EPR-based material models are that it provides a unified approach to constitutive modelling of all materials (i.e., all aspects of material behaviour can be implemented within a unified environment of an EPR model); it does not require any arbitrary choice of constitutive (mathematical) models. In EPR-based material models there are no material parameters to be identified. As the model is trained directly from experimental data therefore, EPR-based material models are the shortest route from experimental research (data) to numerical modelling. Another advantage of EPR-based constitutive model is that as more experimental data become available, the quality of the EPR prediction can be improved by learning from the additional data, and therefore, the EPR model can become more effective and robust. The developed EPR-based material models can be incorporated in finite element (FE) analysis.

This research possesses four relevant characteristics with a potential to contribute to the international business literature. First, it was conducted in three Latin American countries: Peru, Chile and Ecuador (emerging economies) where little research in international business, in comparison with other regions, has been conducted. Second, it was conducted in two industries: mining and oil and gas, which have different ways of organizing and operating in comparison with production and manufacturing industries. Third, it was conducted in remote and sensitive environmental and social areas, where stakeholders and their concerns are different from those of production and manufacturing industries. And fourth, it integrates sustainable development strategies into the field of international business. This thesis provides an in-depth discussion of three case studies and presents conclusions and implications for theory development, managers, and policy makers. The purpose of this research is to contribute to mainstream of the literature on international business by describing and analyzing the incorporation of sustainable development into management strategies.

Objective: This article presents a teacher education program graduates' perceptions of their preparedness to take on roles as FBLA, DECA, and BPA advisers. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to better understand impacts that the model of teacher preparation had on participants' confidence to perform their adviser roles. Method: A descriptive…

This paper presents a service-learning approach to inner city revitalization that is grounded in a human capital model for economic development. The case study demonstrates how a private university became the catalyst for growth in an "at risk" neighborhood of an urban inner city. Our ongoing service-learning project, called The Upper Albany Micro…

Triple Diagonal (M) modeling is a technique to help quickly diagnose an organization`s existing production system and to identify significant improvement opportunities in executing, controlling, and planning operations. TD modeling is derived from ICAM Definition Language (IDEF 0)-also known as Structured Analysis and Design Technique. It has been used successfully at several Department of Defense remanufacturing facilities trying to accomplish significant production system modernization. TD has several advantages over other modeling techniques. First, it quickly does ``As-ls`` analysis and then moves on to identify improvements. Second, creating one large diagram makes it easier to share the TD model throughout an organization, rather than the many linked 8 1/2 {times} 11`` drawings used in traditional decomposition approaches. Third, it acts as a communication mechanism to share understanding about improvement opportunities that may cross existing functional/organizational boundaries. Finally, TD acts as a vehicle to build a consensus on a prioritized list of improvement efforts that ``hangs togethers as an agenda for systemic changes in the production system and the improved integration of support functions.

Age differences on measures of general mental ability and specific cognitive abilities were examined in 2 samples of job applicants to executive positions as well as a mix of executive/nonexecutive positions to determine which predictors might lead to age-based adverse impact in making selection and advancement decisions. Generalizability of the pattern of findings was also investigated in 2 samples from the general adult population. Age was negatively related to general mental ability, with older executives scoring lower than younger executives. For specific ability components, the direction and magnitude of age differences depended on the specific ability in question. Older executives scored higher on verbal ability, a measure most often associated with crystallized intelligence. This finding generalized across samples examined in this study. Also, consistent with findings that fluid abilities decline with age, older executives scored somewhat lower on figural reasoning than younger executives, and much lower on a letter series test of inductive reasoning. Other measures of inductive reasoning, such as Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, also showed similar age group mean differences across settings. Implications for employee selection and adverse impact on older job candidates are discussed. PMID:25822067

Case-based reasoning (CBR) is one of the main forecasting methods in business forecasting, which performs well in prediction and holds the ability of giving explanations for the results. In business failure prediction (BFP), the number of failed enterprises is relatively small, compared with the number of non-failed ones. However, the loss is huge when an enterprise fails. Therefore, it is necessary to develop methods (trained on imbalanced samples) which forecast well for this small proportion of failed enterprises and performs accurately on total accuracy meanwhile. Commonly used methods constructed on the assumption of balanced samples do not perform well in predicting minority samples on imbalanced samples consisting of the minority/failed enterprises and the majority/non-failed ones. This article develops a new method called clustering-based CBR (CBCBR), which integrates clustering analysis, an unsupervised process, with CBR, a supervised process, to enhance the efficiency of retrieving information from both minority and majority in CBR. In CBCBR, various case classes are firstly generated through hierarchical clustering inside stored experienced cases, and class centres are calculated out by integrating cases information in the same clustered class. When predicting the label of a target case, its nearest clustered case class is firstly retrieved by ranking similarities between the target case and each clustered case class centre. Then, nearest neighbours of the target case in the determined clustered case class are retrieved. Finally, labels of the nearest experienced cases are used in prediction. In the empirical experiment with two imbalanced samples from China, the performance of CBCBR was compared with the classical CBR, a support vector machine, a logistic regression and a multi-variant discriminate analysis. The results show that compared with the other four methods, CBCBR performed significantly better in terms of sensitivity for identifying the

Evaluates an American management training program within a Latin American context, exploring the efficacy of using exported, prepackaged training materials within a different cultural realm. The paper focuses on a case study from rural Nicaragua. Suggests that a different approach to management training in Latin America is justified based on…

This report presents an approach for testing artifacts generated in a model-based development process. This approach divides the traditional testing process into two parts: requirements-based testing (validation testing) which determines whether the model implements the high-level requirements and model-based testing (conformance testing) which determines whether the code generated from a model is behaviorally equivalent to the model. The goals of the two processes differ significantly and this report explores suitable testing metrics and automation strategies for each. To support requirements-based testing, we define novel objective requirements coverage metrics similar to existing specification and code coverage metrics. For model-based testing, we briefly describe automation strategies and examine the fault-finding capability of different structural coverage metrics using tests automatically generated from the model.

Recent trends reveal that models of culture aid in mapping the design and analysis of information and communication technologies. Therefore, models of culture are powerful tools to guide the building of instructional products and services. This research examines the construction of the culture basedmodel (CBM), a model of culture that evolved…

Presents models and life-cycle stages of family businesses and issues that have an impact on family business careers. Addresses the roles of career counselors and human resource professionals in supporting family businesses. (SK)

Most of data-mining methods are based on the vector space model of knowledge representation. The vector space model uses the frequency of a term in order to determine its relevance in a document. Terms can be similar by semantic meaning but be lexicographically different ones, so the classification based on the frequency of terms does not give desired results in some subject areas such as the vacancies selection. The modified vector space modelbased on the semantic relatedness is suggested for data-mining in this area. Evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm is better then one based on the standard vector space model.

Background This study describes the experiences and results of a large-scale human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) prevention intervention for long-distance truck drivers operating on the national highways of India. Methods The intervention for long-distance truckers started in 2004 across 34 trans-shipment locations. However, due to poor coverage and utilization of services by truckers in the initial 18-month period, the intervention was redesigned to focus on only 17 trans-shipment locations. The redesigned intervention model was based on the McDonald’s business franchise model where the focus is on optimal placement of services, supported with branding and standardization of services offered, and a surround sound communication approach. Program output indicators were assessed using program monitoring data over 7 years (2004–2010) and two rounds of cross-sectional behavioral surveys conducted in January 2008 (n = 1402) and July 2009 (n = 1407). Results The number of truckers contacted per month per site increased from 374 in 2004 to 4327 in 2010. Analysis of survey data showed a seven-fold increase in clinic visits in the past 12 months from 2008 to 2009 (21% versus 63%, P < 0.001). A significant increase was also observed in the percentage of truckers who watched street plays (10% to 56%, P < 0.001), and participated in health exhibitions (6% to 35%, P < 0.001). Furthermore, an increase from round 1 to round 2 was observed in the percentage who received condoms (13% to 22%, P < 0.001), and attended one-one counseling (15% to 21%, P < 0.01). Treatment-seeking from program clinics for symptoms related to sexually transmitted infections increased six-fold during this period (16% versus 50%, P < 0.001). Conclusion Adoption of a businessmodel for HIV prevention helped to increase program coverage and service utilization among long-distance truckers. Implementing HIV prevention programs in a highly mobile population such as truckers, in a limited number of high

The business rules that underlie an enterprise emerge as a new category of system requirements that represent decisions about how to run the business, and which are characterized by their business-orientation and their propensity for change. In this report, we introduce a decision making methodology which addresses several aspects of the business rules lifecycle: acquisition, deployment and evolution. We describe a meta-model for representing business rules in terms of an enterprise model, and also a decision support submodel for reasoning about and deriving the rules. The possibility for lifecycle automated assistance is demonstrated in terms of the automatic extraction of business rules from the decision structure. A system based on the metamodel has been implemented, including the extraction algorithm. This is the final report for Daniela Rosca's PhD fellowship. It describes the work we have done over the past year, current research and the list of publications associated with her thesis topic.

Kaizen is a proven management technique that has a practical application for health care in the context of health care reform and the 2010 Institute of Medicine landmark report on the future of nursing. Compounded productivity is the unique benefit of kaizen, and its principles are change, efficiency, performance of key essential steps, and the elimination of waste through small and continuous process improvements. The kaizen model offers specific instruction for perioperative nurses to achieve process improvement in a five-step framework that includes teamwork, personal discipline, improved morale, quality circles, and suggestions for improvement. PMID:22201574

Is business education at Catholic colleges and universities different than business education at secular institutions? This study assesses the current state of business education at Catholic colleges and universities based on a national survey of business school deans and faculty members and an audit of business unit web sites. Results suggest…